Q9

[JenniferK632]

This one was a doozy, and I could not differentiate between the answer choices. Could someone help explain the differences?

Thanks a bunch!

[dmitry]

Yeah, this is a doozy indeed! The trick is to identify really clearly what they want out of us, or we may find ourselves looking at all 5 choices without much sense of a difference.

Looking back at the context, the "stone-hard facts" are one part of a Biblical reference: turning stone to bread. The documents are "stone hard" evidence, but they turn into a means of "spiritual sustenance." That's the "bread" part of the metaphor. So to find an analogous case in the answers, we want a situation in which something that plays one role ends up fulfilling another, contrary role. That's where B fits in--what seems slow and plodding is also able to prevail.

The rest of the answers all refer to something in just one way. Their main difference is whether they refer to something within a literary source (C,D), the author of a text (A), or simply a vocabulary word (E). Other than that, they're all pretty much the same. We should be wary, of course, of C. The question can't simply rely on matching one Biblical reference with another! That's a content trap, which is common on matching questions in both RC and LR.