<p>When I entered journalism school in the 1920s, I
found out that perennial and fundamental laws governing
the art of good writing had been discovered. Experts
had stubbornly and rigorously analyzed readers modest
capacity to dedicate their attention to the printed page
and had established once and for all, apparently with the
mathematical precision of astronomers, the order of
readers natural preferences. They found that effective
prose was composed of a limited number of very simple
10 and common words grouped in short, crisp sentences.
When designed rigorously, such prose could penetrate the
opaque barrier of millions of readers indifference, apathy,
inattention, and obtuseness.</p>
<p>The tone of Passage 1 is more:
(C) complacent
<a href="E">b</a> sarcastic **</p>
<p>--> Why is it not C? Doesn't the passage kinda show how the author already accepted the argument that readers prefer simple sentences?</p>
<p>But at the same time, the author was also mocking long-winded sentences by using them in such a ridiculous fashion in this passage.</p>
<p>The passage is about speech errors in children.</p>
<p>But learning is impossible without innately organized circuitry to do the learning, and these errors give us hints of how it works. Children are born to attend to minor differences in the pronunciation of words, such as walk and walked. They seek a systematic basis for the difference in the meaning or form of the sentence, rather than dismissing it as haphazard variation in speech styles. They dichotomize time into past and nonpast, and correlate half the timeline with the evanescent word ending. They must have a built-in tendency to block the rule <a href=“the%20-ed%20rule%20for%20past%20tense”>i</a> * when a competing form (like bled) is found in memory, because there is no way they could learn the blocking principle in the absence of usable feedback from their parents. Their use of the rule (though perhaps not the moment when they first use it) is partly guided by their genes.</p>
<p>** Paragraph 7 (lines 103 to 123) describes **
<a href=“A”>i</a> the way children combine rules and memories during language development <a href=“D”>/i</a> the methods of learning that children use in the absence of parental feedback</p>
<p>–> Isn’t D correct?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>First of all, this is the only sentence in the entire paragraph that conforms to choice (D). Second, the sentence only mentions parental feedback to justify their main point that children use memory to develop their knowledge of language. (Because if there is no parental feedback, what else could it be?) It is not essential to the sentence (imagine the bold part being in parentheses), let alone the paragraph.</p>
<p>Choice (C) refers to rules and memories. “Rules” are mentioned in the paragraph through all the talk about word forms (e.g., past tense), and “memories” are embodied in keywords like “innately,” “circuitry” (i.e., the connection between different parts of your brain; how they work together), “built-in tendency,” “genes,” and, literally, “memory.” All of these have to do with the brain. If that is not enough, and if you do not see where “rules” and “memories” are explicitly discussed together, you can look at the following sentence: </p>
<p>“They dichotomize time into past and nonpast, and correlate half the timeline with the evanescent word ending.”</p>
<p>NOTE: Dichotomize is not really a word. But it comes from “dichotomy,” the process of splitting a whole thing into two parts–kind of like trying to solve a dilemma by giving yourself two options.</p>
<p>Based on context (the previous two sentences) the statement “they dichotomize time into past and nonpast” says that children understand the difference between words in the past tense and words not in the past tense. The statement that they “correlate half the timeline with the evanescent word ending” says that they know the differences PARTLY because of the word ending (walk and walked). However, this is “evanescent,” which means “vanishing,” something we can associate with memory.</p>