<p>This is from Section 8, October 2011 SAT from the QAS.
Here's some context:
Basically, this passage is about writing biographies. The author of this passage discusses her experience in writing an autobiographer for a influential political activist, Ella Baker. She says that "[some] insist that biographical writing is compromised and tainted by an author's identification and closeness with her subject". In other words, critics claim that her admiration of Ella Baker "tainted" her biography.</p>
<p>Here's the passage:</p>
<p>"There are those who insist that biographical writing is compromised and tainted by an author's identification and closeness with her subject. This does not have to be the case. I do not apologize for my admiration for Ella Baker. She earned it. I admire her for the courageous and remarkable life she led and for the contributions she made without any promise of immediate reward. I admire her for the ways in which she redefined the meaning of radical and engaged intellectual work, of cross-class and interracial organizing, and of a democratic and humanistic way of being in the world, all the while trying to mold the world around her into something better.</p>
<p>I first came upon Ella Baker's story through my search for political role models, not research subjects. As an anti-apartheid and antiracist student activist at Columbia University and the University of Michigan in the 1980s and as a black feminist organizer thereafter, I was drawn to the example of Ella Baker as a woman who fought militantly but democratically for a better world and who fought simultaneously for her own right to play more than a circumscribed role in that world. As an insurgent intellectual with a passion for justice and democracy, Ella Baker held an affinity for the most oppressed sectors of our society. So, my first connection to Ella Baker was a political one. This connection has enhanced rather than lessened my desire to be thorough, rigorous, and balanced in my <strong><em>treatment</em></strong> of her life and ideas. For me, there is more at stake in exploring Ella Baker's story than an interesting intellectual exercise or even the worthy act of writing a corrective history that adds a previously muted, black, female voice to the chorus of people from the past. To understand her weaknesses as well as her strengths, her failures as well as her triumphs, her confusion as well as her clarity is to pay her the greatest honor I can imagine. To tell her life truths with all their depth and richness is to affirm her humanity and all that she was able to accomplish, because of and at times in spite of who she was. There are vital political and historical lessons to be gleaned by looking back in time through the lens of Ella Baker's life."</p>
<hr>
<h2>^This is the last paragraph that this one question concerns, but I pasted the entire passage in case some context makes it clearer. This is a vocabulary question concerning the word "treatment" in the last paragraph. I put asterisks around the word ("<strong><em>treatment</em></strong>")</h2>
<p>Here is the question:
In line 86, "treatment" most nearly means:
A. Execution
B. Proposal
C. Practice
D. Management
E. Handling</p>
<p>I eliminated (B), (C), and (D) easily. But execution and handling both seemed to work in the sentence: "This connection has enhanced rather than lessened my desire to be thorough, rigorous, and balanced in my <strong><em>treatment</em></strong> of her life and ideas." The biographer can "handle" the subjects life and ideas in a disparaging, laudatory, or indifferent manner, but "executing" implies "handling and creating". I chose (A) Execution since I felt it implied the implementation of the ideas in a biographical writing. The answer turned out to be (E) Handling.This is a level 4 question. I played Devil's Advocate as many threads about CR, yet I ended up with the wrong answer.</p>
<p>Can someone also try devil's advocate (justifying why each of the two answers is WRONG rather than right, and then choosing the remaining answer) so I can see what is flawed with my Devil's advocate approach (I feel like I'm not doing it correctly...)</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
