Question 34·200 Super-Hard SAT Reading Questions·Craft and Structure

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Text 1

When listeners hear someone selectively recount a shared event, they often mentally retrieve the event to evaluate the recounting. This retrieval strengthens details the speaker mentions but can temporarily inhibit associated details the listener remembers but the speaker leaves out, since those details compete with the mentioned ones. Details from entirely unmentioned categories are less likely to be activated and therefore less likely to be inhibited.

Text 2

Psychologist Amara Nwosu and colleagues showed participants a video of an office relocation. One group viewed the video before hearing a recounting of it, while another heard the recounting before viewing the video. The recounting named some objects from several categories—for example, two books—while leaving other objects in those categories unnamed; it omitted every object from several control categories. On a later test, the video-first group recalled unnamed objects from mentioned categories less accurately than objects from control categories. The recounting-first group showed no such difference.

Based on the texts, which choice best explains Nwosu and colleagues' findings in Text 2 using the account presented in Text 1?

For a cross-text question pairing a theoretical account with an experiment, identify the mechanism's timing and required conditions before evaluating the choices. Then map the mechanism onto each experimental group and verify that the answer explains every reported contrast, including comparison categories.

Hints

Hint 1
Locate the mechanism in time
Determine whether Text 1 places the relevant competition during the recounting or during the later memory test.
Hint 2
Consider what can be retrieved
Ask what information each group already had stored when it heard the recounting.
Hint 3
Account for the category pattern
Compare unnamed objects from categories represented in the recounting with objects from categories the recounting never activated.

Step-by-step

Step 1
Identify when inhibition occurs
Text 1 locates the relevant competition during the recounting: hearing a mentioned detail prompts retrieval of associated stored details, and those unmentioned details can then be inhibited. Details from entirely unmentioned categories are less likely to be activated.
Step 2
Apply the mechanism to the video-first group
These participants had already encoded the office objects. When the recounting named some members of a category, related unnamed objects could be retrieved as competitors and become less accessible, whereas objects from control categories were less likely to be activated.
Step 3
Apply the mechanism to the recounting-first group
These participants had not yet seen the video when they heard the recounting, so its unnamed objects were not stored details that could be retrieved and inhibited. Encoding those objects later therefore did not produce the same selective disadvantage.

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SAT Reading: Craft and StructureAdvancedCoreText 1 and Text 2: how would one author respond?

Question 34·200 Super-Hard SAT Reading Questions·Craft and Structure

Text 1

Text 2

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