Thanks for the question! This is a Main Point passage, so let’s get a big picture idea of what the passage is telling us. The first paragraph tells us that sociologists have applied culturally based or structurally based theories to analyze the socioeconomic achievement of Japanese and Chinese immigrants to the US, and describes both. The second paragraph argues that both of the theories need to be use in conjunction with the other, giving various examples of why this is so. The second paragraph focuses on the “supply side,†whereas the third paragraph focuses on the “demand side.†It’s pretty clear that a main issue of the passage is the necessity of combining of the two approaches, and this is what (E) tells us.
(D) isn’t the main idea of the passage because it doesn’t mention these two approaches. I think you might have gotten confused with the metaphor the author was using in lines 23-27, comparing the culturally based (“supply sideâ€) theory with the structurally based (“demand sideâ€) theory. While the author uses this as a metaphor to help us conceptualize the two approaches, the author isn’t actually making any claims about the market structure of the capitalist economy of the United States. It’s just a metaphor, and not the main point, so (D) is wrong. Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions you might have.
