It's cool to see the differences in low-res summaries between the two of you. Glad to know I don't need to summarize in exactly the same manner as either of you. However, for this passage, I preferred JY's. It really fits with my line of thinking on how I absorbed the information.

Author B, by the very use of trying to build up their argument for steelmanning, seems to have taken the argument from Author A and strawmanned it.

How can you argue that someone being neutral seemingly doesn't also look at both sides of information and is able to steelman both sides--thus understanding both sides as Author B says is a positive trait--in order to sift through said information and construct the better reporting of history? If you're taking a political stance, you're letting bias get in the way. If you're not letting bias get in the way, then you just get the same result that Author A was trying to prescribe for. Author A wasn't purporting that historians can't be political whilst also being neutral in their profession but simply that neutrality should come first in the "workplace," wherever that is for a historian.

The last sentence is definitely a strawman rather than an attempt to steelman Author A's argument.

Okay, I'm glad I haven't touched any PTs up until this point (aside from diagnostic). Plenty of room to experiment. I think I'm usually pretty good at discerning the keen and subtle differences between two different authors (or two different comparative passages).

I think one could make a suggestion that these last three lessons could be summed up as simply paying attention to the author's motive and thus the purpose of a piece of text versus a simple description of what that piece of text is doing and how that translates to picking the correct answer.

However, I really like that the lessons are really drilling it into our heads the tiny, minute differences between the question types and how to approach them. You could have explained everything as just the first sentence I wrote here, but now I'm sure not to forget that sentence because this concept was covered so thoroughly.

Purpose (author's motive) = strict scope on what asked about + reason why author wrote it + accurate description of at least one relevant piece of text.

Main point = simply an accurate description (the most accurate) of what the written text is about or does (not necessarily describing the author's motive)

Is it possible to present more than one solution for a Problem-Analysis? If so, would it then be difficult to differentiate that type of question from a Phenomenon-Hypothesis?

Okay I think I understand the difference between main point and purpose of passage questions.

If I am questioning an action that someone took, I might ask myself two questions: 1) what actions did they take and 2) why did they take that action?

If I can make an analogy of saying "Here is what the person did, this is the point of their action" (grabbing something out of my hand maybe to take my ice cream cone away) to the main point of a passage, then I can analogize the concept of the purpose of the passage to saying "This person took away my ice cream cone for the reason that they could enjoy it instead" (their ultimate motive behind their action was to enjoy it instead).

Answering a "main point" question is being descriptive in an objective sense of what exactly the content of the passage was. A "purpose of passage" question seems to be more on the subjective side than a main point question. The purpose consists of an objective side of describing at least one thing, but it also might be more subjective in that it illustrates what the main motivation for writing the passage in the first place was.

When someone steals my ice cream cone, I would say the main point of the action was simply to take it away from me (using the word steal is already causing a reader to interpret what a motive might be). However, saying that someone stole my ice cream cone would reveal the purpose behind simply taking the cone away from me. There is the objective side, but there is also the more subjective side of the motive behind why the robber did such a thing. Do I know exactly why they did it? No, but I can put clues together from their actions. In the end, I don't know for sure. They could have stolen it to enjoy for themselves, or maybe there is an underground ice cream theft cult dedicated to selling stolen ice cream cones on the black market. Just like I can't prove either of those without the extra, additional context of multiple actions from the robber, I can't quite tell what the motive of the author was in writing the passage without carefully reading between the lines.

#feedback When giving us examples of the wrong answers, you should also give the correct answers next to them just to refresh our memory of what was right.

#feedback The timestamp here is incorrect. It is listed as 6m but the video is just under 8m. Should be 8m.

I chose A initially, switched to B, regretted my choice, and switched back to A in BR. It's a good thing I can go back to submitted questions on the real test.

Dang. Second guessed myself on both the answering and BR of this. I wanted to pick A so badly. However, I thought the critics were suggesting that if it is framed as an autobiography and has real-world characters, it should then be presented as an autobiography.

I totally neglected the fact that it still had fictional relationships and should not be, according to the critics, using real-world characters under fictional circumstances. Ugh. My mind is broken for today. I read the first line Kevin points out and everything.

#feedback Kevin, first of all I want to say thanks for helping me get the correct answer upon my answering of this question.

On the other hand, I also want to recognize that you always do a very great job in explaining why something is right and why something else is wrong. You never shirk that responsibility to us as your students to explain why something is wrong. In previous lessons, when I got a question wrong, I was totally let down and a little insulted that something was sometimes regarded as "obviously" wrong and that we should just not even have considered it. While I probably got some extra practice trying to figure out why it was "obviously" wrong, I also appreciate your style of explaining very intricate or small details I might have missed upon my re-review of the answer choice.

Am I hallucinating or was this part of a Logical Reasoning question? Certainly, it was. I cannot remember the context, however.

Kevin, I see your point on why E was not the correct answer, as that was not the main intent of the context, to prove that women's literature was already flourishing. It also has no base to stand on.

The main reason I eliminated it was that even if women's literature was the bulk of fiction at the time, that does not mean that fiction at that time was flourishing. It could have been that fiction was an extreme minority of novels back then but only that women's literature made up a large portion of that fiction.

Got it right but took way too long. I hope I don't get an art passage on test day.

If anyone wants to study together, let me know.

I'm going to be keeping track of questions that are super difficult for me, and I just don't have the correct perspective to get them right. Well, I can probably figure out any question when given enough time, but I believe having a different person to consult with on questions would speed up the process significantly--mutually.

So are you saying that we should not focus on the timing for whole PTs at least at the very beginning? Unlimited time? Does that go against the previous video where we were told to not take breaks or whatnot just because we can on whole PTs?

For those of you confused: I will try to explain the motive behind both flagging a question and keeping a wrong answer journal, though I think it should just be called an answer journal #feedback. (My comment below reveals I didn't even know how to do this even though I was aware J.Y. said to flag them). I am also aware J.Y. might just explain this in the next lessons again. I really don't know where I saw him talk about this before. Maybe it was at the beginning of the Logical Reasoning section.

I went back after writing this, and yeah, it's in the logical reasoning section, but I swear there was a video for this concept before: https://7sage.com/lesson/the-importance-of-blind-review/

FLAGGING: Flagging a question simply means you weren't one-hundred percent (or, in my mind: like >95%) confident in your answer. Flagging allows you to quickly come back later on and review something you feel like you had a chance at getting wrong.

During the Blind Review (BR) process, you might find that you flag a large amount of questions. however, this is natural. This will reduce over time for two reasons I personally believe. You flagged a lot because you are either not inherently confident in yourself, or you are at the beginning of your studying journey (or both). As you study and go through more Practice tests (PTs), you will find that you feel you are and are getting more and more answers correct. This will naturally lower the number of questions you need to review later on. If you are one of those people like me, who are not inherently confident in yourself, who flag everything, you will find more and more often that your anxious worries were for nothing, and that will boost your baseline confidence, and those number of flagged questions will reduce. In either case, you will most likely be spending less and less time in the future flagging questions and doing blind reviews. You will simply be trying to hone your skills rather than learning the base process of how to do the questions in these PTs or drills.

ANSWER JOURNAL: Sometimes you flag something you got right. You still review it and solidify your reasoning. If you go through more methodically and find out you were wrong (or feel like you were wrong), you will write out why you now think the wrong answers are wrong and why the correct answer was wrong. Maybe you also write down why you changed your answer during BR, and maybe you also write down why you came to the conclusion you did during the drill or PT. You will then, after BR, come back and find out if your reasoning was correct or not. Writing this stuff down makes you hold yourself accountable for how you solved the question. If you come back after the BR and find out you were using flawed reasoning during any portion of your PT or BR, you shatter that notion in your mind and analyze why you were wrong. If you find out you were right to make a certain assumption or choice, you try and solidify that line of reasoning.

I didn't even know we could flag questions. Damn.

B is wrong because there are probably some people back then (certainly are nowadays) who would stare at the sun. Are we really going to think that Author B is asserting that Author A would argue there was certainly an evolutionary psychological explanation for this dumb behavior? Did Author A's argument contain an assumption that would also explain there is a selfish gene responsible for staring at the sun? No; I don't think so. AC B is wrong because, as Kevin said, it is too extreme.

Also, congrats to everyone who has made it through! I'm excited but also scared at the same time lol.

I found this one easy to get because it seemed to me like Author B was being degrading of evolutionary psychology by facetiously anthropomorphizing the genes themselves, almost as if the genes within a single person or amongst entities with shared genes were secretly conspiring to have their genetic material proliferated further without the conscious knowledge of the humans or animals they "inhabited," if that makes sense.

I thought it was quite clear Author B was speaking directly about the genes conspiring, not the evolutionary psychologists conspiring to explain this certain theory.

Phenomenology is a beautiful field of study!

Is the "only if" here still being used as a Group 2 indicator?

It's so satisfying to cross off the two and leave the other three remaining before watching the video and then watching the same result unfold. It's even more satisfying to see the same exact reasoning revealed. I love this method.

I had the hardest time with this during my PT. During BR, it stuck out so clearly. There is one VERY simple fact for why C is right. C shows us that there are products labeled to specifically broadcast that they do not contain chemical pesticides. This carries the assumption that Jason, despite going to a store where there are companies unloading produce with chemicals, only gets the produce that is LABELED.

It would be a stronger refutation to Yu if this carried assumption was explicitly stated, but it is not a far-reach or a stretch to assume Jason only gets the labeled produce if he is already mindful of that in his restaurant marketing.

Here's what I wrote for my Blind Review, if this helps anyone:

A: must be correct because a comparison between species of fishes becoming extinct is being compared to the overall rate of animal extinction patterns of all animals. We do not have any information on whether the pattern of fish extinctions is corroborative unto the general population of animals as a whole. An answer to this question that A poses would resolve this unknown information needed to properly assess the argument made.

_

B: The numerosity of the populations before extinction does not matter. Extinction is a binary concept and does not depend upon how large or small the population was before extinction or how fast they went extinct. All animal populations go small before extinction.

C: Who cares if they originated outside of North America? Perhaps they are making the suggestion that maybe these species that went extinct in North America were somehow more prone to becoming extinct because they weren't from here. Not relevant.

D: Again, extinction is a binary option and does not depend upon the number of living animals. In this case of D, it is that concept paired with recuperation of populations not mattering in the summation of overall extinction rates.

E: This might suggest somehow that perhaps the fish went extinct because they were overfished or something, but that still does not speak to the rates of overall animal extinction, which is the primary topic of this argument