A question about what someone would agree with tests whether you can work out their view from their own words. Find the sentences where the person makes a claim and gives any limits on it. Put each in a few words, and predict only what those lines support. Then check who does what in each part of a choice, because a choice can give people roles the text never gives them.
Hints
- Hint 1
Look for Ortiz’s explanation for the scraps. What does she think the smudged type and incomplete impressions tell her?
- Hint 2
Read Ortiz’s final caution. Which claim does she say the scraps cannot prove, and what possibility explains that limit?
Step-by-step
Read the evidence and the caution
Step 1Identify the rejected sheets
Ortiz reads the scraps’ smudged type and incomplete impressions as clues to what the shop reused, so start there to work out her view. She calls them defective sheets reused by the printer, so they were probably failed prints. That rules out complete, marketable ballads, which gives the sheets the opposite quality.
- Step 2
Connect the scraps to the printer
What connects those sheets to this printer? Ortiz says the typefaces and decorative borders on the scraps match those in intact ballads attributed to the shop. The matching features support the idea that the shop probably printed some ballads.
- Step 3
Find what remains unproven
Does printing also prove selling? Ortiz says the scraps do not prove the shop sold ballads, because the printer may have worked under contract for traveling vendors. The vendors could have hired the printer, so direct sales remain uncertain. A claim that it received damaged ballad sheets from traveling vendors turns that arrangement around by making the vendors supply the sheets.
- Step 4
Test the whole claim
Which choice respects the limits of Ortiz’s view? The claim about readers who also purchased popular ballads adds something her evidence doesn’t address. The choice with probably printed at least some ballads carefully says what the shop printed, while the evidence does not show whether it sold them directly to readers leaves direct sales uncertain. Choice B.