Q5

[kpopstar123]

This question is rather tricky...

I mean I know where this question is exactly coming from:

Line 11 -12 says that Hurston's book was about depiction of a block woman's search for self and community;

Of course, Wright book then would be different in a sense that it focused less on a character...

But I feel as though this question is unfair: I mean the support for the answer is so weak...

I mean I probably only could have gotten this question using POE...

What do you guys think? Was there a strong support or is it just another flawed question from an old prep?

[maryadkins]

Haha. Yeah, I'm with you. That's why getting rid of the wrong answers is the way to go across the board, not just on a question like this but on less frustrating ones as well.

[andrewgong01]

I think the better support (instead of looking at lines 10-13 from the previous post ) is directly at where the Native Son was brought up (Lines 34). A few lines down we see that the Native Son 's author thought Their Eyes had "no theme/message" so that is the difference. More importantly, this lack of theme is given towards the end of the paragraph that said that people like the author of the Native Son did not appreciate the focus on an ordinary woman. This is an implict match for C


A) "few positive" is a comparison trap that requires a pretty high level of support to choose it
b) another comparison trap by saying what is less typical and if anything the Native Sons should be more typical
d) Out of Scope because we do not know how much folklore was in the Native Son
e) Comparison trap because we have no idea what the reaction towards a Native Son was like from the two lens of criticism.

What I found hard about this question was finding where Native Son was in the passage. Is this something that should have been circled during our passage read (it was not on my passage map) because I had to skim the passage two- three times to find the Native Son?

[ohthatpatrick]

I agree, most of the support is in the 29-40 area.

We know that "Native Son" seems to be an example of a work that was "protest fiction that explored the negative effects of racism", and that people like Richard Wright were "unable to appreciate Hurston's [story] of the life of an ordinary Black woman in a Black community".

We would need line 11 to grab that "search for self" part of (C), but (C) is essentially just saying "We know that NATIVE SON was less focused on the-main-point-of-THEIR EYES than was THEIR EYES."

You shouldn't have circled "Native Son" when you saw it. Who cares what Richard Wright wrote? We only care about the bigger point being made about a negative criticism of Hurston's book.

You never need to feel like, "BECAUSE they asked about _____, I should have cared more about _____ on the first read."

They love to ask about meaningless crap.

On the other hand, you SHOULD be concerned if your eyes can't more quickly scan a paragraph for italics. It should be very easy to find keywords that are in italics or have numbers, because they appear distinct to our eyes, if we're just scanning from a bird's eye view.