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Find the main point and map the passage: retrieval: a separate sample with explanations after your response.
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Find the main point and map the passage: retrieval: attempt the main point and structure sample without worked examples. Use the target of each question to decide which information matters, and record your initial response before reading its explanation.
Which statement best captures the passage's main argument?
[1] A historian studying a fictional cooperative finds that interviews conducted forty years after its founding agree on a vivid story: a dramatic meeting persuaded reluctant members to support a shared workshop. The agreement seems at first to strengthen the story's claim to describe what happened. Yet nearly all interviewees had attended anniversary celebrations at which the story was repeatedly performed. Agreement among accounts can arise from independent recollection of an event, but it can also arise from later participation in a shared narrative. Counting agreeing witnesses does not by itself distinguish those sources of agreement.
[2] The historian then finds meeting minutes showing that the workshop had been approved several weeks before the celebrated confrontation. This discovery weakens the claim that the confrontation caused the approval. It does not show that no confrontation occurred, that every detail of the interviews is invented, or that participants deliberately deceived the interviewer. Repeated public retelling can organize memories around a recognizable turning point. An event may acquire an explanatory role in a community's story that it did not have in the sequence of formal decisions.
[3] It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the interviews are useful only as evidence of later identity and never as evidence of early events. Some contain mundane details absent from anniversary performances, such as the arrangement of benches or disagreements about tool storage. Those details still need corroboration; their absence from a public script does not certify their truth. But they suggest questions for other sources that a researcher examining only formal minutes might never ask. Conversely, the minutes record authorized decisions and may omit the informal negotiations that made those decisions workable. The two kinds of source can correct each other's characteristic omissions.
[4] The task is therefore to separate claims within and across sources instead of assigning a single reliability score to an entire genre. For the timing of approval, the minutes provide strong evidence. For the meaning later members attached to participation, the anniversary story is itself evidence, even if its chronology is mistaken. For informal cooperation before and after approval, both sets of materials require further investigation. This approach does not evade the question of truth by treating every account as equally valid. It asks which claim is being tested, how the source could have acquired the relevant information, and what comparison could expose a mistake.
The author primarily argues that:
[1] Critics of a fictional nineteenth-century novel have long treated its abrupt final reconciliation as evidence that the author abandoned a carefully developed conflict. The novel first appeared in monthly installments, and a newly discovered publishing ledger shows that the publisher reduced the planned run by two installments shortly before the ending was written. The discovery offers an attractive explanation: commercial pressure forced an artistic compromise. Yet it would be premature to treat the ledger as a key that unlocks the ending's entire significance. The conditions under which a passage was produced and the work it performs within a novel are related questions, not interchangeable ones.
[2] The ledger supports a specific historical claim about the available publication space. It does not reveal which scenes the author would have written with more space, whether those scenes were already planned, or whether the author preferred the surviving ending to an earlier possibility. A letter describing frustration with the shortened schedule makes constraint more than a merely theoretical possibility, but frustration with a schedule is compatible with satisfaction about a particular artistic result. The documents narrow some uncertainties while leaving others intact.
[3] Reading the ending in relation to earlier installments also complicates the simple compromise account. Several earlier reconciliations appear decisive when first announced, only to reveal unresolved tensions in a later installment. The final reconciliation echoes their language. Readers encountering the novel month by month would have learned to distrust that language before reaching the final scene. The absence of another installment can therefore make the ending unsettling rather than simply reassuring. This observation does not prove that the author intended precisely that effect. It identifies a pattern in the text that remains available for interpretation regardless of the pressure documented in the ledger.
[4] The strongest account would allow the documentary and textual evidence to constrain each other. It would resist inventing an unconstrained artistic plan for which no record survives, but it would also resist reducing every feature of the conclusion to a shortage of pages. If another manuscript disclosed a different ending, that would change the historical account of revision without automatically settling the significance of the published version. Production history can explain why a writer faced certain choices. Close reading can investigate what the resulting choices make possible for a reader. Neither inquiry becomes unnecessary when the other acquires new evidence.
Which statement best expresses the passage's main point?
[1] A fictional laboratory measures the concentration of a compound in water samples collected over several years. Before each batch, technicians test a stored reference sample and adjust the instrument so that it reports the reference's assigned value. This procedure is intended to separate changes in the collected water from changes in the instrument's response. When the corrected records show a gradual increase in concentration, the laboratory initially regards the regular reference checks as a reason to trust the trend.
[2] A later audit discovers that the stored reference slowly loses some of the compound through a reaction with its container. If technicians continue to assign it the old value, their corrections can make the instrument report progressively higher values for unchanged field samples. The reference is not merely a witness to instrument drift; once its value is treated as fixed, its own changes can enter the corrected measurements. Passing a reference check is therefore not independent evidence against this particular error. It is what the correction procedure was designed to ensure.
[3] This discovery does not establish that the field concentration stayed constant. Both the reference and the field samples may have changed. Nor does it make every comparison within the record useless. If samples from two locations were measured in the same batch under the same correction, some differences between them may remain informative even though the absolute values require revision. Whether a particular comparison survives depends on how the correction affects the quantity being compared. A common added offset leaves a difference unchanged; a common multiplying factor does not leave the numerical difference unchanged, though it may preserve the ratio.
[4] To investigate the long-term trend, the audit recommends testing independently prepared references and remeasuring any preserved field samples whose stability can be established. Those qualifications matter. A newly prepared reference with an independently established concentration can help assess the current instrument, but it cannot by itself reconstruct every past reference value. A preserved field sample that has also changed cannot simply serve as a window onto its original concentration. The laboratory should reconstruct the chain connecting reported numbers to stable comparisons, identify which links can be checked, and report the remaining uncertainty. A correction is evidence of care in procedure; it is not a guarantee that the quantity used to anchor the procedure remained constant.
Which statement best expresses the main point?
[1] After a fictional town closes one central street to through traffic, a count shows that vehicle entries on the street have fallen sharply. Supporters describe the policy as a success in reducing traffic; opponents reply that vehicles have merely moved to neighboring streets. Both descriptions may outrun the evidence. The count establishes a change at the monitored location. Whether it establishes success depends on the policy's objective, and whether it represents displacement depends on information about the rest of the network. A local count cannot answer every question simply because it was collected accurately.
[2] Suppose the announced objective was to make the closed street safer and more pleasant for pedestrians. A large local reduction could then be relevant evidence of success even if vehicle trips elsewhere did not decline. If the objective was to reduce total motor travel across town, however, the same count would be inadequate. Some drivers might choose longer routes, some might combine errands, and others might stop driving for particular trips. The possible responses differ in their effects on total distance traveled. None is established merely by observing fewer entries on the closed street.
[3] Additional counts on neighboring streets would help, but even their interpretation requires care. A vehicle may cross several counting points on a longer route, so summing entries at all points is not necessarily a count of distinct trips. Conversely, unchanged traffic at the nearest neighboring streets would not rule out a more distant detour. A useful evaluation would combine strategically placed counts with information about routes, trip purposes and changes over time. Comparable observations before closure would help distinguish policy effects from seasonal fluctuations that happen to coincide with the intervention.
[4] This broader evaluation need not postpone every decision until the town possesses a perfect map of travel. It can state which outcomes are well supported, identify where uncertainty could change a practical choice, and collect further information accordingly. For example, credible evidence of increased exposure to traffic outside a school might justify a protective adjustment even while the effect on total motor distance remained uncertain. That response would not refute the pedestrian benefit on the closed street. It would acknowledge that a policy can improve one outcome while worsening another. The important discipline is to keep the outcome, the geographic scale, and the comparison being claimed aligned with the evidence, rather than allowing a convenient count to stand for an entire verdict.
Review the main point and structure decisions in this reading comprehension sample. Identify the particular restriction or evidence that changed your answer, and return to the corresponding worked lesson before trying a new case.