A question asking which discovery supports an interpretation tests whether evidence backs every part of a claim. Read what the researcher thinks happened, and put the claim in a few words. With several proposed steps, split the claim into parts and ask what would show each one. Then track who supplied what and when, because the evidence must show those steps in the right order. Sharing the topic isn't enough to support the whole claim.
Hints
- Hint 1
Return to the historian’s proposal about the compiler. Split the compiler’s work into two parts.
- Hint 2
The notebook’s consistent wording is an observation. Ask what you’d need to learn about how the instructions reached that form.
- Hint 3
Trace who contributed what, and when. Ask separately what an archival record shows about a recipe’s source and about the compiler’s editing.
Step-by-step
Trace the source and the editing
Step 1Split the historian’s claim
The historian describes the compiler as gathering techniques from local cooks and standardizing the instructions when recording them. What does a supporting discovery need to show? We need local contributions and the compiler’s editing, because the claim explains how several people’s techniques ended up looking uniform in one notebook.
- Step 2
Check the direction of sharing
How could a record show the notebook’s collaborative origins? We’d expect to trace a cook’s contribution into the notebook and see how the compiler changed it. The household copy made shortly after runs the other way: it identifies the compiler as the source for someone else’s copy. That shows recipes spreading from the notebook, not local cooks helping make it.
- Step 3
Test who did the editing
The earlier recipe sheet shows a local contribution, but does copying it almost word for word show the compiler editing it? The cook’s sheet already uses the notebook’s terms and units, so the compiler copies rather than standardizes them. The letter praising adapting recipes from a printed cooking manual shows editing, but the recipes come from a book rather than local cooks. The cook contributes praise, not a technique.
- Step 4
Link the contribution to the rewrite
The cook’s request to put it into your customary measures connects a local contribution to the compiler’s editing. The letter gives the technique in household-specific terms, and the later notebook entry uses standard vocabulary for that same technique. This change shows the compiler turning a cook’s contribution into a uniform entry, explaining how uniform appearance can conceal shared work. Choice A.