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VerbalReading Comprehension

Free GMAT Reading Comprehension Practice Question

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For more than a century, scholars seeking to assign authorship to anonymous works of the late medieval period relied chiefly on stylistic comparison. The method treats an author's habits of phrasing, rhythm, and word choice as a kind of fingerprint: a text of uncertain origin is matched against signed works until a close stylistic cousin emerges, and the cousin's author is proposed as the candidate. The approach is intuitive and has produced durable attributions. Yet it rests on a fragile premise, namely that an author's style is both stable across a career and distinct from that of contemporaries. Apprentices imitated masters, scribes silently revised what they copied, and popular registers of phrasing circulated widely, so the supposed fingerprint is frequently shared.

A newer approach sets style aside and traces instead the documentary trail of a text's circulation: who commissioned it, where copies surfaced, which workshops produced them, and which patrons are recorded as owning them. On this view, attribution should follow the network of transmission rather than the texture of the prose, because that network leaves external records that resist the distortions of imitation. Where such records survive, the author contends, circulation evidence yields attributions more defensible than those style alone can support, since two writers may sound alike but rarely share an identical chain of patrons and copyists.

The claim, however, is bounded rather than sweeping. Documentary trails survive unevenly; for many regions and decades almost nothing remains, and where the record is thin the older stylistic method may be the only instrument available. The author does not propose that circulation evidence replace stylistic analysis everywhere, but that, where both can be brought to bear, the documentary trail should ordinarily carry the greater weight. The proposal is therefore less a rejection of the older practice than a reordering of its priorities, one that concedes the persistence of cases in which no method can move past informed conjecture.

The passage provides support for each of the following statements EXCEPT:

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Answer & Explanation

Correct answer

C

Stem type: a detail EXCEPT question. Four choices are statements the passage supports; the credited answer is the one statement the passage does NOT support (here, the one it reverses). Work the four supported choices first, then confirm the remaining choice is contradicted.

Supported (therefore NOT the answer): (A) The first paragraph states the stylistic method 'has produced durable attributions.' 'Durable' is paraphrased as 'have endured for a long time.' Supported. (B) The first paragraph says the method 'rests on a fragile premise, namely that an author's style is both stable across a career and distinct from that of contemporaries.' That an author's style differing from contemporaries' is part of what the method's reliability depends on. Supported. (D) The second paragraph says 'two writers may sound alike but rarely share an identical chain of patrons and copyists.' The choice restates this with 'sounds alike' and 'unlikely to share the same chain of patrons and copyists.' Supported. (E) The third paragraph says documentary trails 'survive unevenly; for many regions and decades almost nothing remains, and where the record is thin the older stylistic method may be the only instrument available.' If the circulation record is nearly absent and only the stylistic method remains, then the circulation-based method cannot be applied there. Supported.

Credited answer (C) is the statement the passage contradicts. The third paragraph is explicit about the relative weight of the two methods when both can be used: the author proposes that 'where both can be brought to bear, the documentary trail should ordinarily carry the greater weight.' Choice (C) reverses this, making stylistic comparison 'the more decisive of the two.' That is the opposite of what the passage claims, so (C) is the statement the passage does not support and is the correct answer to an EXCEPT question.

The trap in (C) is direction: a reader who absorbs that the passage favors using both methods together, but not which method the author says should dominate, will read (C) as consistent with the text. The passage's hedge ('ordinarily carry the greater weight') is assigned to the documentary trail, not to stylistic comparison.