A finding question tests whether new evidence supports a claim in the passage. Start with the writer’s interpretation and put the claim in a few words. If it has several parts or rules out other explanations, you need evidence for each part. Then predict what would show the whole claim, and test the findings against that prediction. A finding can share the topic and sound persuasive while leaving the claim’s main point untested.
Hints
- Hint 1
Go back to the last two sentences and separate what the historian claims from what it rules out.
- Hint 2
Read the words after the colon to unpack editorial synthesis. Ask what happens to the narrators’ differing accounts.
- Hint 3
What does masked add to the claim about the reader’s view of the editing?
Step-by-step
Test every part of the interpretation
Step 1Read the contrast
The notebooks show narrators disagreeing over why events occurred and in what order, while the printed tales have smooth, apparently stable plots. What must the archival evidence explain? It must show how collectors turned disagreements into a settled story, since local language alone doesn't explain that change.
- Step 2
Split the claim
What does linguistic signs of fidelity masked an editorial synthesis mean? Local expressions make the book seem true to the narrators while hiding an editorial synthesis, a new story built from several versions. The historian points to incompatible narrative details, so we need a joining of details that originally clash. The word masked adds that readers aren't openly told about the joining.
- Step 3
Cross out partial support
Set aside one narrator's complete plot sequence, because it chooses a plot rather than joining clashing plots. Does a published headnote explaining the merger support hidden editing? It shows openly acknowledged compilation, not hidden editing. The details that supplemented rather than contradicted one another also lack the incompatible narrative details the historian describes.
- Step 4
Read the edit in the draft
How can conflicting departure motives become a single traditional account? The draft that recasts their mutually incompatible departure motives as successive causes turns competing reasons for leaving into stages of one story. No notebook contains that combined plot, so the collector built a new account rather than copied one. The idioms the collector kept give the tale a local voice, and the book doesn't tell readers that the account is composite. Choice A.