Hi,

Can anyone tell me why Answer to first question is not option C? I chose it from last sentence in passage which says "What they learn is a trained incapacity to speculate or raise questions, to try stylistic and formal alternatives."

Also why is option B correct? like yes passage said about academic essays but related to students it just said writing essays. Are we supposed to assume this is related to Academic essay? like what indicators tell us that it is academic essay that author is talking in last line

You are not meant to assume that they are talking about academic essays in the paragraph, but instead follow the logic in the argument in order to know that they are.

The students trying "stylistic and formal alternatives" is indeed a product of the incapacity to speculate or raise questions, but what causes this to happen in the first place? It is the constraints of the academic essay; so if we follow the logic of the paragraph we have:

Constraints of the academic essay ----> incapacity to speculate or raise questions ====> trying stylistic and formal alternatives

can you explain 2nd question please?

First, let's look through the paragraph and see where they mention the Sophists:

As the Sophists (and many others subsequently) noted, language necessarily affects the truths that it can say or name. How we write is as important as what we write. From this perspective, rhetoric aims at knowledge, or makes it available. How it is made available will vary according to the apparatus in which it is generated.

It then goes on to talk about one "apparatus" in particular, academic essays, and how the constraints lead to downstream effects in students' writing. A constraint is a limitation or restriction (a stricture if u want to involve GRE vocabulary) and since we are not asked to critique the argument, we can assume the author mentioned the Sophist in order to strengthen his or her argument. Thus, the only reason they would mention it is to support the notion of the limitations of language. How we write constrains the truth that is made available and for students this has specific effects mentioned in the conclusion of the paragraph.


So we were able to find the answer by doing a deep dive into the passage material. But this takes a lot of time and is probably too time consuming to do on the exam. The cool thing though, is that we don't really need to do such a thorough analysis in order to find the right answer and can instead find it through the process of elimination. Let's return to the question:

The author of the passage mentions Sophists primarily in order to

A. illustrate how a certain group’s rhetoric influenced their ability to influence others
There is no mention in the passage about influencing anyone.
B. contrast one group’s ability to ascertain the truth from language to another group’s ability to do the same
They only talk about two groups of people in the paragraph: Sophists and students; and they are not contrasting these two groups (showing how they are different).
C. argue that past intellectuals were more innovative than present thinkers
No mention of this in the paragraph.
D. explain how the Sophists were the first group to understand how language affects truth
This is tricky as it makes sense on the surface, but even if this is true, there is no indication of this in the piece of writing.
E. identify an example of a group that was aware of the limitations of language
It's got to be this!

Wow, wasn't too far off. Thanks for the OA.

Updated my reply to underline "affects the truths that it can say or name"