A logical completion question tests what follows from the clues when you accept someone's conclusion. Read the words leading into the blank, then find the conclusion they refer to. Find its supporting reasons and put each clue in a few words so you can connect them. From those clues, predict only what they support, without adding a new purpose. Wrong answers can repeat the text's words while changing the link between the evidence and the conclusion.
Hints
- Hint 1
The ending asks you to take Zhou's conclusion as true. Reread the sentence that gives that conclusion and ask what Zhou is explaining about the myths.
- Hint 2
Look at the phrase after because. What is the role of the leaf and bird changes in Zhou's reasoning?
- Hint 3
Trace the chain from the cues to what residents did and what that helped them achieve. Predict what this chain suggests about why the myths arose.
Step-by-step
Connect the cues to survival
Step 1Accept Zhou's explanation
Start with If Zhou's conclusion is correct: we're accepting Zhou's explanation and asking what follows about the myths. What conclusion are we accepting? Zhou says they likely arose as practical tools for survival, so the blank is about why the myths first developed, not only how residents later used them.
- Step 2
Join the clues and predict
How could these stories help people survive? They guided residents to harvest and dry berries just before the season's first snowfall, leaving food for months when fresh produce was scarce. They also encode specific phenological cues, signs of seasonal change in plants and animals, so the leaf and bird changes could signal when to act. Let's predict why the myths arose: help people use those signs to prepare winter food.
- Step 3
Test the proposed purposes
Let's test the endings against because they encode specific phenological cues. The phrase appealing to tradition adds a reason Zhou doesn't give and makes attention to those cues unnecessary. The wording coordinate communal labor adds a group-work purpose and says environmental signs don't matter. Does nutrition more than the timing of harvest follow? It doesn't, because it pushes aside the seasonal timing that explains the myths' survival value.
- Step 4
Match both parts of the ending
The wording originally devised to record observable environmental changes fits encode specific phenological cues, because both describe myths preserving seasonal signs. Why call those signs critical to community nutrition? They help residents know when to dry berries to ensure a supply of vitamin-rich food, so the signs protect the winter food supply. Choice B.