Question 192·Hard·Rhetorical Synthesis
While drafting a health-science article, a writer has compiled the following notes about a recent study:
• A 2022 meta-analysis tracked 680,000 adult smartphone users for six months.
• Researchers recorded each participant’s daily screen time after 7 p.m.
• For every additional hour of screen use after 7 p.m., average nightly sleep decreased by 5 minutes.
• Thirty percent of participants enabled the phone’s blue-light filter during evening use.
• Among blue-light-filter users, sleep decreased by only 2 minutes per extra hour of screen time.
• The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends 7–9 hours of sleep per night for adults.
The writer wants to highlight the potential benefit of using a phone’s blue-light filter during the evening. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?
For rhetorical synthesis questions like this, start by circling or underlining the exact goal in the question stem (here, “highlight the potential benefit of using a phone’s blue-light filter during the evening”). Then scan the notes and mark only the details that connect directly to that goal—in this case, the bullets that mention the blue-light filter and how it changes sleep loss compared with normal phone use. Next, eliminate any answer choices that (1) don’t mention the key topic (the filter), or (2) mention it but don’t show its effect or advantage. Among the remaining options, choose the one that most directly and efficiently expresses the relevant relationship, especially if it uses the key numbers from the notes to make the benefit clear.
Hints
Focus on the task words
Underline the phrase "highlight the potential benefit of using a phone’s blue-light filter during the evening." Ask yourself: which answer must mention what good or helpful effect the filter has?
Locate the relevant bullets
Look through the notes and find the bullets that talk specifically about the blue-light filter and how it relates to changes in sleep time. Ignore notes that don’t connect to the filter.
Check for cause-and-effect, not just facts
Among the choices, look for one that not only mentions the filter but also shows a relationship between evening phone use, the filter, and how much sleep changes. Eliminate answers that only give background numbers or simple descriptions.
Step-by-step Explanation
Clarify the writer’s goal
The question says the writer wants to highlight the potential benefit of using a phone’s blue-light filter during the evening. That means the best sentence must:
- Clearly mention the blue-light filter.
- Show that using it has some positive effect or advantage, especially related to sleep.
Find the relevant notes
Look back at the bullet points and pick out the ones about the blue-light filter and its effect:
- "Thirty percent of participants enabled the phone’s blue-light filter during evening use."
- "Among blue-light-filter users, sleep decreased by only 2 minutes per extra hour of screen time."
- Compare that with the general finding: "For every additional hour of screen use after 7 p.m., average nightly sleep decreased by 5 minutes."
Together, these show that with no filter, sleep drops by 5 minutes per extra hour, but with the filter, sleep only drops by 2 minutes per extra hour. That difference is the “benefit” the sentence must highlight.
Test each choice against the goal and notes
Now check which options actually do the job:
- One option talks about how many people were in the study or what was recorded; that’s background, not a benefit.
- One option mentions the percentage of participants who used the filter but says nothing about how it affected their sleep; that doesn’t show an advantage.
- Another option discusses how much sleep adults should get (7–9 hours), which is about recommendations, not about the filter’s effect.
Only one choice both mentions the filter and compares sleep loss with and without it, using the 5-minute vs. 2-minute numbers from the notes.
Select the choice that shows the benefit clearly
The only answer that directly uses the key data (5 minutes of sleep lost per extra hour of evening phone use vs. only 2 minutes when the blue-light filter is on) and clearly shows that the filter reduces sleep loss is choice B: “The study found that using smartphones after 7 p.m. shortens sleep by about 5 minutes for every extra hour of use, but that loss shrinks to roughly 2 minutes when the phone’s blue-light filter is engaged.”