A words in context question tests whether you can use the passage to find a missing word’s exact meaning. For a blank in a final sentence, trace the idea it sums up and follow any signal words. Ask what the whole text supports, then predict in plain words. Check each word’s meaning against that prediction, including how strong it is, because a word can point the right way and still say more than the passage does.
Hints
- Hint 1
Start with the sentence beginning “Those choices.” Find what the historian’s punctuation and paragraph breaks can do to a remark.
- Hint 2
Check the limit on those choices. How does the part beginning “though” set a limit on what they can do?
- Hint 3
The last sentence uses thus to draw a conclusion. Predict the blank in your own words using both parts of the sentence about the historian’s choices.
Step-by-step
Follow the clue, then check the exact meaning
Step 1Find what the print choices do
The historian must choose punctuation, paragraph breaks, and indications of pauses, even if the speaker’s wording stays the same. How do those choices affect a reader? They can make a remark seem hesitant, emphatic, or abrupt, so the way speech appears on the page can change the tone a reader hears in it. The blank must describe that effect on the reader’s experience.
- Step 2
Predict the effect and its limit
What limit does the text put on that effect? The phrase though they cannot dictate a reader's interpretation says the historian doesn’t decide exactly what a reader will think. The final sentence sums up these effects, and without necessarily distorting that account means that shaping how someone reads the account needn’t give a false picture of the speaker. Predict help shape the reader’s experience without fully controlling it.
- Step 3
Test the words’ exact meanings
Which meanings miss our prediction? Moderate means to make something less intense, but making a remark seem hesitant, emphatic, or abrupt isn’t always a way to soften it. Authenticate means to prove something genuine, but the historian isn’t checking the account’s source or truth. Govern means to control or direct, but control is stronger than the text allows: the features cannot dictate a reader's interpretation.
- Step 4
Put the fitting word in the blank
Mediate means to act as a go-between, shaping how two sides connect; the medi part means middle. The print features sit between the spoken interview and its audience, so they mediate the reader's encounter with the speaker's account by guiding how the words come across. Choice C.