I need to find an answer that describes the way that the passage explains how we got to the Dust Bowl. This is harder than it seems, since the passage just looks like the author is listing a bunch of events that interlinked and lead to the Dust Bowl: the cattle bonanza, the determination of farmers, and industrial agriculture, each following the other. I don’t feel like I have a strong grasp on what the right answer to this question will look like, so I should try to eliminate my way to the right answer by looking for choices that do not seem to resemble the passage.

This is a tough choice to eliminate or choose. The passage does mention some individuals, but it also focuses on the movements of masses of people, as well as economic and ecological forces. Because I am so unsure of A, I’ll leave it, but look for a reason to pick another answer choice.

I can eliminate B because the author does use specific facts in the passage; quite a few in fact.

I don’t recall a single triggering episode mentioned for the Dust Bowl; if anything, the author lists many factors, so C is likely wrong.

This seems right. The passage begins with the purchase of the land that would eventually become the Dust Bowl, then progresses forward in history, listing different factors that made the land more and more vulnerable to the dust storms that would make the land the Dust Bowl. I would choose D over A because D corresponds to more of the passage; there’s no easy way to see A as including all the environmental factors that lead to the Dust Bowl, while D could easily describe both those and the actions of individuals.

Dry farming is mentioned in paragraph 4, but without a clear definition of what it actually is. Paragraph 5, however, does offer that information: “Farmers in the dry-farming program were directed to disk-plow their fields every shower.” Disk-plowing does “not penetrate far into the ground” but moves “quickly, chopping up the topsoil to produce rough clods that increased water absorption, killed weeds efficiently, and, when used frequently, resulted in a finely pulverized layer for seeding.” So I know I am looking for an answer choice that describes at least some of that.

Nothing in paragraph 4 or 5 mentions attempts to prevent erosion in the description of dry farming, so A is safe to eliminate.

This seems right, because it resembles my prediction from paragraph 5. Making “cuts on the soil surface” sounds like “not penetrating far into the ground,” and promoting “the absorption of water” sounds like producing “rough clods that increased water absorption.” Still, this is a tough question, so eliminating the other choices quickly also makes sense.

The passage states the opposite of C: that dry farming produces a “finely pulverized layer for seeding,” or a thin layer. So C has to be wrong.

This choice is meant to trick me because the first half of the choice is stated in the passage, but the second half is not. Dry farming does not seek out moisture deep in the soil; it instead tries to retain as much surface moisture as it can. D has to be wrong, and B has to be correct.

There is no efficient way to predict an answer choice that includes something that the author does not say, so I have to just be ready to eliminate each answer choice that mentions something stated in the passage.

This is almost certainly an incorrect answer choice, given that the passage keeps pointing out the ways that humans helped to create the conditions for the Dust Bowl. A also brings the disk plow to mind, which the second-to-last paragraph claims that “In years of scant rainfall, the farmers disked their fields so often that some observers blamed the 1930s dust storms on the misuse of this single instrument.” So since the passage mentions A, it has to be incorrect.

B is definitely mentioned in paragraph 3, when the author describes the “cattle barons, who in some areas had herds four times as large as the grass could support, resulting in long-lasting depletion and erosion.” That makes B wrong.

This is a bit harder to find, but one such policy is mentioned in paragraph 4: the Enlarged Homestead Act, which drove more farmers into the region: “This surge of settlement prepared the Dust Bowl.” So C also has to be wrong.

D has to be right, even though one can be forgiven for thinking that the passage mentions these conditions. A “six-year drought” is mentioned in paragraph 4, and the last paragraph mentions a “severe drought.” However, this choice is playing with our presumptions that any drought is unnatural or unusual. The passage never says that these drought conditions were not part of the natural weather cycle in the area, so the author actually never mentions D. That means that D has to be correct.

This question adds information to the passage, and asks what the author would say about this new information. The passage discusses wheat farming as part of what made the Dust Bowl in paragraph 5. One can only imagine that the increase in wheat demand that is described in the question stem would only make conditions worse, and speed up or intensify the development of this land into the Dust Bowl. That’s probably what I’m looking for in a right answer.

A tests if I’m paying attention to the passage, which states that farming contributed to the Dust Bowl. More farming, especially of the same crop as those which contributed to the Dust Bowl, would not have “delayed the onset of the Dust Bowl.” That makes A incorrect.

Nothing in the passage discusses “ecologically sound cultivation,” so there is no basis to believe the author would say anything like B.

The last paragraph mentions imbalances in the grain market, but that happened well after 1913 and 1914. C is also wrong because the author is focused on explaining the Dust Bowl, which C does not do.

This is the right answer because it is clearly in line with the author’s arguments. The author never stops listing reasons for the Dust Bowl; the information in the question stem would only add to those reasons.

To answer this question, I need to find an answer choice that relates to the information in the question stem. This information is all about farmers growing richer and expanding their farms, so the right answer should have something to say about wealth and the transformation of the land.

This is a good candidate for the right answer. I know that dry farming is what helped people to cultivate undeveloped land (paragraph 5), and people got wealthy if they took a strictly commercial view of the land (last paragraph). That’s enough resonance with the passage to make A correct.

This seems to correspond to a lot of the information in the question stem, but B is a trick answer choice. The author never says that one needs a lot of land to be successful as a wheat farmer. The closest the passage gets is saying that farmers sought large amounts of land to dry farm, but it does not suggest that having less land would make it harder for them to be successful farmers. Farmers with smaller plots of land may have successful, but not fabulously wealthy. That possibility is enough to make B worse than A.

This is an easy one to eliminate because the new information in the question stem doesn’t say anything about the disastrous consequences of farming too much of the land.

D is also an easy elimination, because nothing in the question stem references “freedom and equality.” Given how bad these other choices are, A has to be correct.

This is a straightforward strengthener, so the right answer will give another reason to distinguish between a scientific and a humanistic approach. Since there are many different ways to do that work, I should just go straight to the answer choices and eliminate my way down.

We tend to think that if many people believe something, then that thing has a higher likelihood of being true, but that is not necessarily so at all. Nothing in the passage depends on many people believing what the author does, so A would not make the argument more convincing.

B is closer to a right answer, and is even more tempting than A. However, B fundamentally adheres to the same logic as A. Nothing in the author’s argument demands that any number of actual humanists and scientists agree with the passage argument, so B would also not lend much support to the argument.

This is a good answer choice. The author relies on reasoning and logic to make the main idea convincing. More examples to supplement the author’s reasoning and a clearer set of reasons why stories and scientific theories differ would therefore definitely strengthen the author’s argument by reinforcing what the author already does.

D is also an attractive answer choice, but it has to be wrong, though, because while D would help distinguish between paradigmatic and narrative thinking—which is in the interest of the main idea—nothing in the argument depends on one mode of thinking being more difficult than the other. D is also wrong for very technical reasons: the author argues that paradigmatic thinking is not reconcilable with narrative thinking. That means that the two forms of thinking should not be comparable at all: even in terms of difficulty. In that sense, D actually weakens the author’s argument.

I don’t even need to look back at the passage to predict the answer to this question. Throughout the passage, the author only cites and quotes people who support the main argument, so Toulmin and Bruner are likely cited because they too believe that scientists and humanists have different approaches to their crafts, and that their work should therefore be evaluated differently.

No one argues that paradigmatic and narrative thought can be reconciled; the author argues the opposite. So A has to be wrong.

This is a tricky answer choice, since I also know that the author agrees with Snow. However, the author does not clearly endorse Snow’s explanation of humanists and scientists, and a quick scan of the passage suggests that both Toulmin and Bruner are making slightly different points in order to argue for the same conclusion: that humanists and scientists have different methods. Given that Snow and Toulmin are in the same paragraph, but that the author does not obviously suggest that Toulmin believes exactly what Snow believes, B has to be wrong.

C is wrong for the same reasons A is wrong: because the author argues the opposite, and because the author brings up no one who disagrees with the main idea.

This is correct because D is essentially a restatement of the main idea.

Snow is mentioned in the first paragraph: “C. P. Snow argued that humanists are profoundly ignorant of the methods and results of science and that to a nearly equal extent scientists are ignorant of the humanities.” Though the passage as a whole is about how scientists and humanists differ, Snow’s unique contribution to the argument is that he focuses on “methods and results”: in other words, on training and education. The right answer should therefore mention training.

This is incorrect because nothing in the sentence referencing snow mentions personalities.

B is wrong for the same reasons: because nothing in the quote from Snow says anything about one’s childhood.

This is correct because “professional training” is where one might learn about “methods.” If scientists were trained differently, they might know the humanities better, and vice versa.

This is also easy to eliminate because Snow only comments on what people know, not how they live.

These two examples stood out enough during my initial reading of the passage that I already know why the author makes them: to showcase the entailments of the passage’s main argument. Marx and Freud are both described as problematic science, but also as good and convincing stories. If I accept the author’s main argument regarding the different methods for different disciplines, I can respect Marx’s and Freud’s work in the right context—a narrative one—and dismiss it in another: the scientific one. Since this is implicitly a weakener, I need to come up with an answer that will diminish the rhetorical effect of this reference. So if the author is arguing that Marx and Freud are good narratives but bad science, then they would become irrelevant to the argument if they were both based on science: if they were meant to be taken as science and not story.

This is incorrect because the passage does not say anything about how the two theories relate to each other. Whether or not they contradict each other matters less to the passage than does their scientific and rhetorical value. Since I don’t know enough about them to be sure what effect it would have if they contradicted each other, A has to be incorrect.

That is what I am looking for. The author only uses them because they are examples of bad science but good stories. If they were instead examples of good science, then they could not easily make the point that they have value in one methodology but not the other. B has to be correct.

The author actually admits to almost as much in the passage, and does so in order to make the point of that second to last paragraph, so this would not change these examples’ relevance to the author’s argument.

D is wrong for the same reasons that C is wrong: because the author states that these theories make for good stories, which implies that they obey the conventions of good stories. Since nothing would change with D, D cannot affect the relevance of the theories to the author’s argument.

This question stem implies that the wrong answers will all weaken the passage, while the right answer will not: will either strengthen the argument or, more likely, have no effect on the argument at all. There is no real way to predict what the right answer will look like beyond this, so it makes sense to eliminate my way to the right answer.

This has to be correct because it is out of the scope of the passage, and so would not be damaging to the passage arguments. The passage is about differences between scientific and humanistic modes of inquiry: how they differ, and have rules that do not apply to each other. The existence of some other mode of inquiry that is neither paradigmatic (scientific) or narrative (humanistic) would have no effect on an argument which states that those two modes exist. The only way that would happen is if the passage argued that there were only two modes of inquiry, which the passage does not do. The closest the passage gets is the quote from William James in paragraph 2, but the author does not actually say that James is right. Instead, the author takes from James the idea that different disciplines might have different modes of thinking. The passage actually implies the opposite of what James says; if there are different modes of inquiry with rules of their own for science and the humanities, there might be one for every discipline. A has to be right.

I can eliminate B because “systematic, objective thinking” is defined as paradigmatic thinking, while novelists and playwrights should be using narrative thinking. If writing novels and plays involves elements of scientific thinking, then the author’s argument about there being distinct rules for the different approaches would be less likely. Since B would weaken the author’s argument, I can eliminate it.

C is wrong for the same reasons B is wrong: it assigns elements of narrative thinking to what should be a paradigmatic discipline.

This is the most tempting wrong answer; I’m lucky that A is so clearly correct. D is ultimately incorrect, though, because it lightly weakens the argument by challenging one of its fundamental premises: that we can even have specific modes of inquiry that apply to disciplines. For example, if methodological differences exist within the sciences, it makes no sense to talk about paradigmatic thinking: thus weakening the author’s argument.