Question 56·200 Super-Hard SAT Reading Questions·Craft and Structure
Architectural historians disagree about how three seventeenth-century plans produced in the Maren workshop came to share the same inaccurate angle for a tower wall. Sel argues that the draftspeople copied a common master drawing; Ivo argues that they surveyed the same partly collapsed building independently. Infrared imaging has revealed guidelines matching a surviving master drawing beneath the first two plans, but not beneath the third, which also depicts repairs absent from the other plans. Workshop records date the first two plans to before those repairs and the third to after them, although all three preserve the inaccurate tower angle. Contemporary inspection notes report that the repairs stabilized the tower without changing the wall’s angle.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?
For a function question involving competing explanations, map each piece of evidence to the claim it supports or limits. Pay particular attention to chronology and concessive words such as “although,” then choose the option that accurately captures the sentence’s complete role without treating suggestive evidence as conclusive.
Hints
Separate the evidence types
Track what the infrared imaging, workshop records, and inspection notes each establish.
Examine the chronology
Consider how placing the plans before or after the repairs affects the relevance of each historian’s explanation.
Interpret the concession
Pay attention to the clause beginning with “although” and ask whether the shared feature conclusively supports either account.
Step-by-step Explanation
Identify the competing explanations
Sel attributes the plans’ shared feature to copying from a master drawing, whereas Ivo attributes it to independent surveys of the same damaged building.
Connect the chronology to the physical evidence
The first two plans predate the repairs and contain guidelines matching the master drawing. The third postdates the repairs, depicts them, and lacks those guidelines, so the evidence allows different production explanations to apply to different plans.
Interpret the shared error
All three plans retain the same tower angle, but the inspection notes state that the repairs did not change that angle. Thus, both a copied plan and a direct survey could reproduce it, so the shared feature alone does not settle the dispute.