Question 160·200 Super-Hard SAT Reading Questions·Information and Ideas
Researchers have often treated household remedy notebooks kept in eighteenth-century British port cities as isolated records of family knowledge. Historian Leila Morgan instead tracks clusters of recipes that moved among households through lending circles, correspondence, and servants changing employers. Many recipes reappear with altered instructions, although copyists rarely identify the sources of revisions. Mere variation could reflect copying errors or adaptations to locally available ingredients. Yet Morgan argues that the pattern of changes over time points to more than unstable transmission. She proposes that these informal circulation networks sometimes enabled users to recognize a remedy's practical shortcomings and gradually improve its instructions without any central authority directing the revisions.
Which finding, if true, would most strongly support Morgan's proposal?
For a command-of-evidence question, translate the claim into a checklist of distinct requirements. Then evaluate each option against the entire checklist rather than selecting evidence that supports only the general topic. Give preference to evidence that directly links a cause, response, and result while also matching any condition about scope or attribution, such as the absence of central coordination.
Hints
Break apart the proposal
Identify every element the evidence must support, including the type of change and how that change was coordinated.
Seek a before-and-after pattern
Look for evidence connecting an observed problem in an earlier version with a relevant revision in later versions.
Check the source of direction
Evidence of successful revision is not enough if a formal organization supervised or distributed the revision.
Step-by-step Explanation
Identify the claim's requirements
Morgan's proposal has several parts: users recognize a practical shortcoming, change the instructions in a way that improves the remedy, and do so through informal networks rather than under a central authority.
Look for a complete chain of evidence
The strongest evidence should show a before-and-after pattern: an early version produces a reported problem, later users introduce a relevant change, and subsequent records indicate that the problem has stopped. It should also establish that no editor or organization directed the change.
Select the best-supported finding
The finding that satisfies all these requirements is: Early copies of one salve recipe contain notes that it separated in storage; in later copies from lending circles with no shared editor, users add the same stabilizing step, after which such complaints cease.