A question about how one author would respond to another tests how you connect claims and reasons. Read the question to find who answers whom, then sum up each text’s claim and evidence. If a claim says what must come first, check the other text’s evidence about that order. Predict the response: would the author reject the claim, limit it, or take it further? Even a choice that takes the right side can give a reason the author never offers.
Hints
- Hint 1
Look at the order of events Text 1 insists on. Which author does the question ask to respond to that claim?
- Hint 2
Compare Text 2’s building dates and food remains with that claim. Does the site follow the order Text 1 says must hold?
Step-by-step
Test the requirement against the evidence
Step 1Find what Text 1 makes necessary
Text 1 ties monumental building to intensive, surplus-producing agriculture. Why does it make farming necessary? Producing extra food frees people to work on structures rather than on getting food. The question asks Text 2’s author to answer the claim that monuments appear only after farming intensifies, making agriculture a requirement rather than one possible help.
- Step 2
Combine the dates and food evidence
Does Text 2’s site fit that order? Radiocarbon dates place its major building phases centuries before the region’s earliest domesticated cereals. Remains dominated by wild species also indicate reliance on foraging, meaning people got food from wild sources. Together, these clues show a foraging community building large structures before domesticated cereals.
- Step 3
Name the author’s response
Text 1’s claim, appears only after agriculture intensifies, rules out any monuments before intensive farming. Can that rule allow the site described in Text 2? It can’t, because the earlier foraging site gives an example that doesn’t follow the rule, so the author would reject the requirement that intensive farming must always come first.
- Step 4
Match the response and its reason
Which response gives that rejection for the author’s own reason? The choice about well-dated monuments built by foragers uses both the timing and food evidence. Its phrase not a necessary precondition means not something that must come first, so it answers Text 1’s claim without saying agriculture never helps construction. Choice C.