A words in context question tests which meaning the surrounding text supports. Read the whole passage and find the clue and its direction: a reason explains the blank, while a contrast turns away from an idea. When the clue has two parts, predict a phrase that includes both parts in your own words. Then check what each choice names and whether the text shows it. A related idea can still be wrong if it adds something the passage doesn't say.
Hints
- Hint 1
Read the second sentence as the clue to the historian's description. Separate what comes before but from what comes after it.
- Hint 2
Return to the opening and check who wrote the correspondence. How does that help explain the second sentence?
- Hint 3
Read the final clause about the porters' own interpretations. Use it together with the words before but to predict the blank.
Step-by-step
Use the contrast to predict
Step 1Find the reason for the description
The correspondence was written mostly by officers, so the description in the blank has to follow from who wrote the letters. What do those letters show about the porters? Let's read the next sentence for how the porters appear in a record written mainly by other people.
- Step 2
Predict from both parts of the clue
The porters appear frequently, but almost always through officers' comments, so the contrast is about how they're shown, not whether they're mentioned. What does the final clause add? Their own interpretations of events are largely unavailable, which means we can read about them without hearing how they understood what happened. Let's predict present in the record, but seen through other people's accounts.
- Step 3
Test what each phrase claims
What do the phrases mean when we put them in this sentence? Documentary absence means being missing from a written record, but the porters appear frequently. Institutional authority means power tied to an organization, which the passage doesn't give the porters. Deliberate reticence means choosing to say little, but the text only says that the porters' own interpretations of events are largely unavailable, which doesn't show a choice to stay quiet.
- Step 4
Check the phrase's full meaning
Mediated means made known through someone or something in between; think of mediate, to act as a go-between. Visibility means being seen or shown, so mediated visibility describes being shown through another person's account. The porters appear through officers' comments, which is exactly what that phrase means. Choice B.