Q3

[raqueljpaul]

Hello,

Can someone please explain why the answer is B and not A? I understand that is is a Analogy/Application question, can you also please explain the proper approach to these type of questions?

Thanks so much!

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Analogy/Application

Answer expected in lines/paragraph:
54-60 (although ceremonies first appears in 49, that line doesn't contain any descriptive detail we could use).

Any prephrase?
To answer an Analogy question, we need to tease out buzz words or phrases, or we need to draw a "moral to the story". It's essentially like doing Match the Reasoning in LR, but definitely less obvious in terms of how to represent the material in the abstract.

What are we told about how they use video to record ceremonies? We're told that the technical aspects of the ceremony video (the editing / camerawork / etc) mirror the ceremonies. They use the same principle of beauty: a complex pattern of repetitio and sequential organization.

So there are two main contenders for our buzz phrase -- "to create a complex pattern of repetition and sequential organization" (feels unlikely because WTF does that mean?) or "the videos aesthetically mirror the ceremonies" (you're documenting some content, and you choose to make your documenting align with the style of the content itself).

Lastly, we might think about the author's purpose in discussing the Kayapo's use of video: to strengthen the idea that a non-Western culture can use a piece of Western technology in non-Western ways.

Correct answer:
B

Answer choice analysis:

(A) Kayapo didn't move somewhere and bring THEIR stuff there. Westerners brought OUR stuff TO the Kayapo.

(B) Yes, this could fit our last prephrase. Latin American people used another culture's technology (African American jazz) in a Latin American way.

(C) There doesn't seem to be any dimensions of one culture vs. another in this one. There IS a new technology. It's expected to radically re-shape an art form. For the Kayapo, there is a new technology (video), but it is NOT radically re-shaping an art form (they are staying true to their ceremony and making the new technology adapt to the existing style of the art form)

(D) A retro style was a fad? Hard to match that to anything.

(E) Not clear there's a culture vs. culture or new technology here. Europeans ARE still Western. They basically rejected Western painting in favor of Western literature.

Takeaway/Pattern: Analogy questions are consistently among my and most of my students' least favorite RC question types. If you have difficulty finishing an RC section, you may want to commit to a decent guess more quickly on your next Analogy question, since the extra time we take trying to figure out what the heck the test writers are going for often does not correlate to better accuracy on our eventual guess.

We need to find a way to put the subject matter asked about into more abstract terms. Here, it was really tough to know what they were fishing for, given "use of video to document ceremonial performances".

Did they want an analogy for what those videos are like? (complex patterns, etc.)

Did they want an analogy for the connection between the videos and their content? (form of the video mirrored form of the subject matter)

Or did they want an analogy for how Kayapo's use of video fits into the context of technological determinism? (does using another culture's technology inevitably make you act more like that culture)

We could have easily been blindsided by (B) on this one if we were too narrowly expecting it to work in one of those first two ways mentioned.

#officialexplanation