Which one of the following phrases is used by the author of passage B to express a concern that is most closely relat...

shunhe on June 16, 2020

Hi @aonyonyi,

Thanks for the question! So this question is basically asking for what author B says that’s expressing the same concern author A was expressing when they said “lack the wherewithal” in line 7. First things first, we go to line 7 and the surrounding lines (which we should read for context) to figure out what author A was saying when they said that.

The author here is talking in this paragraph about why trial court judges oppose doing independent research to inform their decisions. One of the reasons, the author says, is that judges “lack the wherewithal” to conduct good research, and might use bad research methods. Basically, judges might mess up the research, and make inferences they’re not supposed to based on bad methods/science etc.

So now we need to look for something that expresses this same idea in passage B. You can try to remember where passage B talks about this, or if you really can’t remember, you can look at the line numbers in the answer choices to direct you to certain lines to see if those work. Ideally, you’d have some idea, and here, you should remember that the author talks about the appellate court “going outside the record to determine case facts” in the last paragraph. How would an appellate court do this? By conducting its own research! And indeed, later in this sentence, we see that the author talks about the appellate court substituting “its own questionable research results for evidence.” In other words, the appellate court does some sketchy research and gets sketchy results. This is exactly the same idea as line 7 in passage A, and so we pick (D).

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.