Cross-Text Connections

Text 1: In a widely cited study, the biologist Ana Reyes recorded New Caledonian crows bending lengths of wire into hooks to extract food from narrow tubes. Because none of the birds had ever watched another crow perform the behaviour, Reyes concluded that hook-making in this species is innate: the birds arrive with the design already specified, and experience merely supplies the occasion to express it. Text 2: Reyes's birds were not naive. All had spent months in enclosures furnished with pliable twigs, and juvenile crows in such settings handle flexible material constantly. A bird that has spent a season discovering what a twig does when it is bent has been trained — not by another crow, but by the material. What Reyes documented may well be a genuine capacity, but the absence of a demonstrator does not establish the absence of learning.

Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to Reyes's conclusion as it is described in Text 1?

• ABy disputing that the crows produced hooks at all, since bending in an enclosure full of pliable material is as likely to have been accidental.

  This reads the pushback as an attack on the data, but Text 2 concedes the finding outright — "What Reyes documented may well be a genuine capacity." The twig-filled enclosure is introduced as a source of prior learning, not as a reason to doubt that hooks were made.

• By granting that no crow learned the behaviour by watching another crow, while denying that this rules out learning of a different kind.

  Correct, and it matches Text 2's final sentence almost clause for clause: the absence of a demonstrator does not establish the absence of learning. Text 2 accepts Reyes's observation (no demonstrator, hooks made) and refuses the inference (therefore innate), on the grounds that months of handling pliable twigs is itself a training history. Alternative explanation at does-not-establish strength — note that Text 2 never claims hook-making is learned, only that innateness is not shown.

• CBy agreeing that hook-making is innate, while adding that the trait emerges only in birds housed with pliable material.

  "May well be a genuine capacity" is a concession about the behaviour, not agreement that it is innate — and the rest of the paragraph exists to argue that innateness has not been shown. The second half of this choice is also self-undermining: a trait that emerges only given a particular history of handling material is the learning account, not the innateness account.

• DBy objecting that Reyes should have tested a second corvid species before drawing conclusions about hook-making in birds.

  A reasonable-sounding methodological complaint that Text 2 never makes; its objection is about an unexamined source of learning within the study, not about generalising across species. Reyes's conclusion as reported is already scoped to New Caledonian crows, so the complaint does not even land on the claim in question.

Traps tested: Manufactured dispute · Concession misread as agreement · Imported critique

Text 1: The economist Marcus Delaney's analysis of 240 municipal transit expansions found that ridership rose an average of 18 percent in the three years after a new rail line opened. Delaney argues that a pattern this consistent supports a general rule: cities seeking to raise transit use should build rail. Text 2: Delaney's average conceals its own explanation. Of the 240 expansions, 61 occurred in cities that simultaneously raised downtown parking prices, and those 61 account for nearly all of the aggregate gain; across the remaining cities, ridership was essentially flat. Rail may still be worth building, but the evidence assembled here supports a considerably narrower claim than the one Delaney draws from it.

Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely characterise Delaney's "general rule"?

• AAs disproved: in the 179 cities that did not raise parking prices, ridership was flat, which shows that new rail lines do not increase ridership.

  Text 2 writes "Rail may still be worth building" — an explicit refusal to draw this verdict. A flat result in one subset shows that rail alone did not raise ridership in those cities; converting that into a general claim that rail does not increase ridership is exactly the overshoot Text 2 declines to make. Right direction, wrong strength.

• BAs premature, since a three-year window is too short to reveal lasting changes in commuting habits.

  Text 2 never raises the length of the follow-up window; its entire objection is about which cities the gain came from. This is a plausible criticism of a study of this kind, written by someone other than Text 2's author, and choosing it means answering from what such an objection usually says rather than from what this one does.

• CAs correct in principle but impractical, since few cities can afford the political cost of raising parking prices.

  Nothing about affordability, political cost, or feasibility appears anywhere in Text 2, which is an argument about what the data support, not about what cities can manage. It is also the wrong shape: Text 2 questions whether the rule is established, not whether it can be implemented.

• As broader than his own data support, since nearly all of the average gain he reports comes from the minority of cities that also made driving more expensive.

  Correct, and it is Text 2's closing sentence restated: the evidence supports a considerably narrower claim than the one Delaney draws from it. Scope limitation, not refutation — Text 2 accepts the 18 percent average as computed and shows that it is carried by 61 of 240 cases in which a second intervention ran alongside the rail line, so the rule as stated reaches cases the data never tested.

Traps tested: Binary collapse · Imported critique · Outside knowledge import

Text 1: Critics have long read Charlotte Mew's late poems as records of private grief, taking the recurring image of the shuttered house as a figure for the poet's own withdrawal. On this account the poems' formal severity — the clipped lines, the endings that refuse to resolve — is symptomatic: the form registers a mind under pressure. Text 2: To treat Mew's shuttered house as autobiography is to mistake a device for a confession. The image appears first in poems written years before the losses it is said to encode, and it is given to speakers Mew takes evident pains to distinguish from herself. The clipped lines are worked, not involuntary; the manuscripts show the severity arriving late, in revision.

Based on the texts, both authors would most likely agree with which statement about Mew's late poems?

• AThe shuttered house is best understood as a figure for Mew's withdrawal from public life.

  That is the reading Text 1 reports and Text 2 exists to dismantle — "to mistake a device for a confession." On a both-agree stem, the claim the second text is arguing against is the one thing that cannot be shared, and it is the choice most students reach for because it is the pair's most memorable sentence.

• BThe poems are best read alongside Mew's letters rather than in isolation.

  Letters are mentioned in neither text. This is written to sound like the balanced position between a biographical critic and a formalist one, which is precisely what makes it attractive; but a compromise neither author states belongs to a third writer who is not on the page.

• The formal severity of the late poems is a real feature of the work that calls for explanation.

  Correct. Text 1 describes the clipped lines and unresolved endings and explains them as symptomatic of a mind under pressure; Text 2 describes the same severity and explains it as deliberate craft introduced in revision. The two authors disagree entirely about the source and agree completely that the feature is there and needs accounting for — the shared premise both arguments are built on, which is the standard profile of the credited answer on this stem.

• DThe severity of the late poems was introduced during revision rather than present in first drafts.

  True according to Text 2, which cites the manuscripts, and untouched by Text 1, which never mentions drafts or revision at all. A student who verifies this against Text 2 and stops has done half the check; Text 1's silence is not agreement, and its reading of the form as symptomatic gives it no reason to endorse a claim about revision.

Traps tested: Single text claim as shared · Invented middle ground · Single text evidence as shared

Text 1: Between roughly 1300 and 1450, hundreds of villages across northern England were abandoned. The conventional explanation is plague: a settlement that lost half its inhabitants within a decade, the argument runs, fell below the number of households required to work the open fields, and the survivors had no choice but to leave. Text 2: Plague mortality by itself cannot have emptied a village, since abandonment frequently followed an outbreak by two full generations. What the outbreaks did was raise wages. With labour suddenly scarce, a tenant who stayed could bargain — and a tenant who left could bargain better still, in a town or on richer soil. The villages did not die of plague; they were dissolved by the opportunities plague created.

Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to "the conventional explanation" described in Text 1?

• ABy arguing that the plague played no meaningful role in the abandonment of northern English villages.

  Text 2's last clause keeps plague in the causal chain explicitly: the villages "were dissolved by the opportunities plague created." Rejecting a mechanism is not rejecting a cause, and treating the two as the same is the standard way this pair is misread.

• By granting that the plague set the abandonments in motion while denying that it did so by leaving too few households to work the fields.

  Correct, and it splits the conventional explanation exactly where Text 2 splits it. The cause is retained — labour scarcity produced by mortality — and the specific mechanism is rejected: not too few hands to farm, but wages high enough that leaving paid. The two-generation delay is the evidence for the split, since a village emptied by insufficient households would have emptied at once.

• CBy noting that the two-generation gap between outbreak and abandonment shows the two events were unrelated.

  This lifts a real detail out of the argument it serves. Text 2 uses the delay to rule out one mechanism, then immediately supplies a second — a labour market reshaping itself over decades — that runs through that exact interval. The gap is offered as evidence for a slower causal path, not for no path.

• DBy accepting the conventional explanation and adding that wages also rose in the decades following the outbreaks.

  Reads the wage material as a supplement to the conventional account rather than a replacement for it, which the sentence "The villages did not die of plague" rules out directly. Text 2's wages are not an additional factor alongside depopulation-forced-departure; they are the alternative to it.

Traps tested: Binary collapse · Evidence detached from its argument · Supplement misread as agreement

Text 1: The gullies cut into the walls of Martian craters are young — some incise dunes only a few million years old. The planetary scientist Hana Osei notes that they also branch and taper exactly as terrestrial water channels do, and that hydrated salts have been detected in the debris at several gully mouths. Liquid brine, briefly stable under present-day Martian conditions, is in her view the most economical account of all three observations. Text 2: Blocks of carbon dioxide frost, sublimating as they slide, can excavate channels indistinguishable in plan view from those cut by water; laboratory flumes have reproduced the resemblance repeatedly. Morphology does not discriminate between the two processes, and a hypothesis resting on channel shape is resting on the one piece of evidence that cannot decide the question.

Based on the texts, how would Osei most likely respond to the argument advanced in Text 2?

• ABy conceding that channel shape cannot distinguish the two processes and withdrawing the brine hypothesis.

  Osei can grant Text 2's point about morphology without withdrawing anything, because Text 1 credits her with two further observations the objection does not touch. Conceding the part of an argument that has been answered is correct; conceding the whole argument is an overshoot the text does not license.

• BBy disputing the laboratory result, since sublimating carbon dioxide has never been observed to carve a channel on Mars itself.

  Text 1 gives Osei no basis for challenging the flume experiments, and the claim that the process has never been observed on Mars appears in neither text. This is a response manufactured from what an opponent would presumably want to say, rather than from what her text actually supplies.

• By pointing out that Text 2's objection reaches only one of the three observations she cites, leaving the hydrated salts at the gully mouths unaddressed.

  Correct, and the item turns on a mischaracterisation planted in Text 2's final clause: it describes the brine account as "a hypothesis resting on channel shape," whereas Text 1 presents Osei's case as resting on three observations — youth, morphology, and hydrated salts. Text 2's argument disposes of morphology and is silent on the salts, so the response Text 1 licenses is a correction of scope, not a concession or a counterattack.

• DBy arguing that the youth of the gullies rules out carbon dioxide frost as their cause.

  Youth is genuinely one of Osei's observations, which is what makes this tempting — but neither text connects frost activity to the age of a landform, and the sublimation process Text 2 describes is a present-day one, so recency does not select against it. A real detail from Text 1 is being carried past anything either text supports.

Traps tested: Over concession · Manufactured dispute · Evidence stretched past its warrant