Question 119·200 Super-Hard SAT Reading Questions·Craft and Structure
Text 1
Historians sometimes use the number of handwritten comments in surviving early modern books to estimate how actively those books were read. Historian Mira Patel urges caution with such estimates. Surviving copies do not represent all reading settings evenly, and rules about writing in books differed among those settings. A scarcely marked book may have circulated widely in a school or lending collection where annotation was discouraged, whereas a heavily marked private copy may have had only one reader. Marginalia can reveal forms of engagement, Patel argues, but counts of marginal notes alone cannot establish relative readership.
Text 2
Jonas Reed studied copies of the same six eighteenth-century travel narratives held in household and subscription libraries. Borrowing ledgers showed that the subscription-library copies circulated more often, yet those copies contained fewer handwritten comments. The libraries' rulebooks imposed fees for marking books. Household copies, by contrast, often contained comments added by family members over several generations. Reed concludes that the physical traces in a copy reflect the conditions under which it was used as much as the number of people who read it.
Which choice best describes how Reed's study in Text 2 relates to Patel's argument in Text 1?
For a cross-text relationship question, divide the first text's argument into distinct claims and determine which one the second text directly tests. Pay particular attention to study-design limits: comparing multiple settings may reveal differences between them without establishing whether the surviving sample represents those settings accurately.
Hints
List the claims separately
Identify the two different reasons Patel gives for being cautious about annotation counts.
Examine the study design
Consider what comparing the same narratives across household and subscription libraries allows Reed to investigate.
Distinguish comparison from representativeness
Ask whether including examples from two settings establishes how well surviving copies reflect the full historical population of books.
Step-by-step Explanation
Separate Patel's concerns
Patel raises two distinct problems: annotation practices differed among reading settings, and the surviving collection of books may not represent those settings evenly.
Identify Reed's direct evidence
Reed finds that subscription-library copies circulated more often but contained fewer comments, while library rulebooks imposed fees for marking. This evidence supports Patel's claim that marking conditions can separate the number of annotations from the amount of readership.
Evaluate what the comparison cannot establish
Using copies of the same narratives helps Reed compare their treatment in household and subscription-library settings. It does not show how frequently copies from those settings survived or whether the surviving historical record represents all settings proportionally.
Select the precise relationship
The best choice must therefore distinguish between the marking-rules claim, which Reed supports, and the representativeness concern, which his study leaves unresolved.