Which one of the following best describes the overall organization of the passage?

shunhe January 10, 2020

Hi @Meredith,

Thanks for the question! Glad to know you got the right answer. So the first thing I would do for a question like this would be to briefly summarize the main points of each of the paragraphs and what they do. The first paragraph introduces books about Watteau and a blind side of theirs—that they accept Watteau’s image of his age. The second paragraph points out that Watteau saw little of the “witty and amiable” century and discusses reasons why, such as the wars that France was involved in. The third paragraph tells us that Watteau admirers would usually just ignore the actual background of these works, or others would accept the historical facts to refute deterministic views. Even those writers would still say Watteau’s work personified the 18th century, and came up with another experience to explain the discrepancy.

This matches up with what (E) tells us. The particular viewpoint is the viewpoint that Watteau’s image of the 18th century was accurate. The shortcomings are that this doesn’t accord with reality. The last paragraph tells us that people still persisted with the viewpoint despite these facts.

We can eliminate (A) because the phenomenon of thinking Watteau’s work characterized the 18th century accurately was not “atypical,” nor were the reasons “refined.”

We can eliminate (B) because we don’t make assumptions, we just discuss other people’s assumptions.

We can eliminate (C) because we aren’t giving multiple hypotheses accounting for the view that people had. We’re told that people have this view because of Watteau’s friends, but this hypothesis isn’t rejected and replaced with another, it’s asserted as pretty much fact.

We can eliminate (D) because we don’t talk about the general characterization’s applicability to any particular groups, nor do we support the general characterization with examples. Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any further questions you might have.