A question about how one author would evaluate another’s conclusion tests whether you can compare their views. Use the question to find who answers whom, then sum up each text’s claim and evidence. Name the responding author’s view: reject the conclusion as wrong or unsupported, accept it as true only in part or in some cases, or apply it to a new case. Check the reason, because a choice can take the right view for a reason the responding author never gives.
Hints
- Hint 1
Use the question to check who is evaluating whose conclusion, so you know which author’s view must guide the response.
- Hint 2
In Chen’s final sentence, work out how she ranks the causes of migration.
- Hint 3
How do Lewis’s wage figures and crop yields bear on Chen’s ranking of the causes?
Step-by-step
Compare claims, then check the reason
Step 1Pin down Chen’s claim
Find Lewis (Text 2) in the question: he’s evaluating Chen’s conclusion in Text 1. What does Chen conclude? Her letters and diaries about shortages lead her to put crop failures first and give urban wages only a secondary role. We need Lewis’s judgment of which cause mattered most.
- Step 2
Weigh Lewis’s evidence
How do Lewis’s records test Chen’s ranking? He finds that average factory wages rose nearly 40 percent, while agricultural yields remained largely stable. Higher wages gave households a reason to seek city work, and the rural newspaper ads show that they could hear about those earnings. Stable yields don’t mean no family faced a failed harvest, but they challenge crop failure as the chief reason for the whole wave.
- Step 3
Name his view
Lewis calls higher pay the principal motive, so would he keep Chen’s conclusion with a small correction? He would reject her ranking, meaning he thinks what she says about the main cause is wrong. The response that would commend Chen credits her with putting wages first, which she doesn’t do. Calling her emphasis on crop failure essentially correct accepts the ranking Lewis rejects.
- Step 4
Check the reason for disagreement
The response about recent immigrants shifts to a group neither text discusses, so it gives Lewis a reason he never uses. The response saying Chen underestimates the economic incentives instead challenges the small role she gives the allure of higher pay, which is Lewis’s own reason for disagreeing. Choice C.