A question about two texts tests how one author would judge another author’s claim. Find who answers whom, and focus on the underlined claim rather than the whole text. Put each text’s claim and reason in a few words. Ask whether the response would reject the claim, add limits to it, or apply it to another case. Then check the responding author’s reason, because a choice can respond in the right way for a reason the text never gives.
Hints
- Hint 1
Ask what the underlined sentence claims about Goldman’s source. What does it use the resemblance between the writers to prove?
- Hint 2
Read the sentence beginning “yet by the 1890s” and the list that follows. What do they tell you about who was using this idea?
- Hint 3
Compare the two explanations for the resemblance. Does Text 2’s final sentence support the source named in the underlined claim?
Step-by-step
Test the claim of influence
Step 1Pin down the claim
Text 1 turns the writers’ shared view of education into a claim about where Goldman got her idea. What does that resemblance supposedly prove? The underlined sentence says she derived her argument about education directly from Wollstonecraft’s earlier works, so we need Text 2’s author to judge the claim of direct influence.
- Step 2
Find the other explanation
Text 2 accepts the echo in language and urgency, but what does it add about the idea’s history? By the 1890s, radicals on both sides of the Atlantic routinely linked education with emancipation. The list of communalists, labor pamphleteers, and suffragists shows that many reform groups already used this idea, so the idea wasn't limited to these two writers.
- Step 3
Identify what the author challenges
Would Text 2 deny the resemblance or challenge what it proves? It would reject the claim as unsupported, since a shared idea doesn't by itself show a direct source. So rather than shared ideas misses the common theme, while any similarity is coincidental conflicts with Goldman’s use of a widely shared revolutionary vocabulary.
- Step 4
Check the reason, not only the view
Does Text 2 show that Wollstonecraft’s ideas reached Goldman through later nineteenth-century reformers? Naming those groups doesn't show that they passed Wollstonecraft’s arguments along to Goldman. Instead, less to a lone channel of influence challenges the attempt to name one source. The choice about the idea being commonplace among radicals points out what the claim overlooks: resemblance isn't enough to name one direct source when the idea was already widespread. Choice D.