Q14

[aryehkln94]

Hey
How is are the words "did not originally serve as a form of money" in answer choice B supported? All the passage says is that they were used PRIMARILY for political purposes. I picked E for this reason.

Help? Thx?

[maryadkins]

Lines 7-11. The Europeans are the ones who turned it into money.

(E) is too narrow. The passage isn't just about how historians overlooked the role of the wampum prior to European arrival. It is more focused on how the wampum was used, and how it was eventually used to encode the constitution. Same with (C), which is also too focused on the Europeans.

(D) is not supported. The passage does not suggest this.

(A) is contradicted. The strings of beads were formed "later" (line 33).

[andrewgong01]

Not sure if this was an "illegal inference" i made but when down between "A" and "B" I ruled out "A" because it says "the need for communication between nations...[led to the wampum]" but but Lines 37-42 never said "need to communicate"; it only said "political purposes" and "formation of the confederacy" as the creation of the wampum. I think on the one hand it probably implies the "need to communicate" but at the same time it also seems like an "assumption" that the test wants to trick us with with a small detail creep like some other questions

I didn't notice the other detail creep that "strings" came later...seems like a small detail creep to trick us

Lines 7-11. The Europeans are the ones who turned it into money.

(E) is too narrow. The passage isn't just about how historians overlooked the role of the wampum prior to European arrival. It is more focused on how the wampum was used, and how it was eventually used to encode the constitution. Same with (C), which is also too focused on the Europeans.

(D) is not supported. The passage does not suggest this.

(A) is contradicted. The strings of beads were formed "later" (line 33).

[seychelles1718]

how long should I have spent on this question? This passage was the hardest in the section for me and this question took me more than a minute to solve (I still got it wrong) even though it's a main point question...
How do I tackle this long, wordy main point questions quickly and accurately? Is there any way to efficiently eliminate wrong answers?

[fanshuhaodg]

For main point questions, my experience is to just read through the questions with your own formation of the answer in mind. Usually, you will rule out most of the choices based on your own formation and down to two, in which one is wrong not because of its general idea but rather because of an inaccuracy of details that is clearly inconsistent with the passage.

For this question, for example, my answer to the main point question in mind was something like the wampum experienced several stages of development, from religious to simple political messages, and finally to more complicated ones with symbols for political purposes.

Then, I looked at questions:
a) looks like what I have in mind, talking about development and political use.
b) also looks like it, about evolvement and connecting the first para and the last para.
The next three don't even line up with my formation, so I quickly ruled them out:
c) definitely wrong, since the focus of the passage is not the change after eureopeans but the development.
d) clearly wrong again, since it turns around the development - the confederacy is not origin but the result.
e) irrelevant, since we are not talking about historians' ignorance at all.

So now we are down to two, what I do is to scrutinize the details (rather than the overall idea) - and (a) has that obvious detail inaccuracy that it says wampum originated with "strings of beads with religious significance" but we know that religious meaning is attached only to loose beads, and later string wampum was used to send political messages.

It will be much harder to differentiate (a) and (b) based on how well it summarizes the passage, since there are always different ways to do that and omitting some details is not detrimental to a main point question. So rather than trying to figure out what exactly one choice is missing for main point, it is easier to look at the details for obvious inconsistency (instead of those that requires interpretations). Hope it helps!

how long should I have spent on this question? This passage was the hardest in the section for me and this question took me more than a minute to solve (I still got it wrong) even though it's a main point question...
How do I tackle this long, wordy main point questions quickly and accurately? Is there any way to efficiently eliminate wrong answers?