A logical completion question tests whether you can finish a text’s reasoning from its clues. Read the words leading into the blank, and ask whose conclusion you’re completing when the text presents someone’s argument. Put the earlier clues in a few words, then predict the smallest supported conclusion before looking at the choices. Keep the claim no stronger than the evidence, because a likely conclusion isn’t the same as proof. Wrong choices often add ideas the text never gives.
Hints
- Hint 1
Look at the repeated pattern in Xu’s comparison. What does Xu find alongside each diary entry about exceptionally harsh conditions?
- Hint 2
Read Xu’s interpretation and the phrase immediately before the blank. Predict a short ending that follows both, using no claims beyond what those words support.
Step-by-step
Follow the historian’s reasoning
Step 1Find whose view the ending completes
Historians prized the diaries as unvarnished records of Arctic weather patterns, or honest accounts of the weather. The final sentence begins Xu argues that this pattern suggests, so whose view must the blank complete? We’re following Xu’s argument about the diaries, not repeating their old reputation.
- Step 2
Connect the repeated events
What does Xu’s comparison add? Xu finds that each time Lockwood recorded exceptionally harsh conditions, he sent funding appeals exaggerating his vessel’s damage and crew’s privations. This is a repeated link between diary hardship and appeals for money. Reports of severe conditions could make the expedition’s need for support sound urgent, which helps explain why Xu questions the diaries’ role as weather records.
- Step 3
Make a small prediction
Xu says Lockwood shaped his diary narratives to advance fundraising goals and rejects their role as objective data. What small conclusion does that support? The diaries served an effort to win money, without claiming that every weather detail was false. The generally objective weather records ending contradicts Xu’s view. The without distorting the weather data ending adds a claim about accuracy that Xu’s findings don’t support.
- Step 4
Name the diaries’ role
The factual summaries of ship logs ending invents how the diaries were made and when Lockwood used them. The phrase calculated rhetorical tools means deliberately written texts used to persuade. Their aim of attracting financial backers matches the fundraising purpose Xu gives to the diary narratives, so this ending completes the argument. Choice C.