A sentence function question tests whether you can name an underlined sentence’s job in the whole text. Read it with the surrounding sentences, and label each sentence’s job. If it weighs evidence, ask what that evidence can and can’t show. Then predict its job and what it connects to, using the text before and after it. Check each choice in full, because the right job can still be tied to a later finding the text doesn’t support.
Hints
- Hint 1
Read the critics’ view alongside the sentence about the ledgers. Ask what the ledgers leave out and why that matters to that view.
- Hint 2
Check what the underlined sentence says about the ledgers. What role does it give their silence in the text’s argument?
- Hint 3
Read from “Conservators subsequently found” through the final sentence. Ask what each finding adds to the text’s explanation of the halos.
Step-by-step
Trace the challenge and what follows
Step 1Identify the setup
The critics call the halos deliberate citations of open-pit pottery, meaning Calder meant to refer to that pottery. That’s the setup, the view the text will examine. Her ledgers contain no mention of smoke firing or pit-fired models, so we’re asked what the underlined sentence does with that silence.
- Step 2
Read the limit on the evidence
How far can that silence take us? The sentence calls it more useful for unsettling the established account than for replacing it. It explains a limit on the evidence: missing entries weaken the critics’ view, but they don’t tell us what really produced the halos. Our prediction is a challenge to the old account, not a replacement for it.
- Step 3
Track what the findings add
What do the later findings add? Early clay could create halos without special intervention, while Calder later reproduced the halos with a manganese wash. The findings show a material effect followed by deliberate reuse. The phrase leaving the question of intention open misses her later choice to recreate the halos. And confirming it for the later ones goes too far: keeping the look doesn’t show that she meant to refer to open-pit pottery.
- Step 4
Check the job and its connection
The phrase narrow the possible physical causes gives the sentence the wrong job: the underlined sentence says what the ledgers can show rather than listing possible causes. Which description names the job and the connection? Provisional challenge means a challenge that doesn’t yet settle the issue, and initial emergence versus later use names what the later findings explain. Choice C.