Overall Text Structure

For decades the standard account of the Nazca lines held that the figures were meant to be seen from above, an idea that made the geoglyphs seem impossibly ahead of their time. Recent fieldwork has shifted the emphasis. Archaeologists tracing the lines on foot report that many of the figures are single continuous paths, a design that makes sense for people walking them in procession. On this reading, the lines were not images to be viewed but routes to be travelled.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

1. It presents a long-standing interpretation, introduces work that redirects attention, and states the alternative interpretation that follows.
2. It describes a discovery, lists the methods used to make it, and evaluates their reliability.
3. It contrasts two archaeological teams and explains why one team's methods are superior.
4. It raises a question about an ancient site and concludes that the question cannot be answered.

Coral reefs are usually described as a partnership: the coral animal provides shelter, and the algae living in its tissue provide most of its food. Bleaching occurs when the partnership breaks down and the algae are expelled. Yet some reefs in the Persian Gulf survive water temperatures that would bleach reefs elsewhere, and the corals there host algae strains with unusual heat tolerance. The finding has redirected attention from the coral animal to the identity of its partner.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

1. It explains how a biological partnership works and defines the term for its breakdown.
2. It explains a biological partnership, notes an exception to the usual pattern of breakdown, and describes how that exception changed the focus of research.
3. It argues that a widely used term has been defined incorrectly.
4. It compares reefs in two regions and explains why one region's reefs are more valuable.

Public health campaigns often assume that people who know the risks of a behaviour will change it. Surveys consistently show, however, that knowledge and behaviour come apart: smokers estimate their own risk about as accurately as non-smokers do. Some researchers have therefore shifted attention from information to friction — the small costs and inconveniences that shape what people actually do. Whether reducing friction produces durable change, rather than a brief shift, is still an open question.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

1. It presents two competing research programmes and explains the historical origins of each.
2. It describes an assumption and offers a series of examples that confirm it.
3. It describes an assumption, presents evidence against it, introduces the alternative focus that has replaced it, and identifies what remains unsettled about that alternative.
4. It criticizes public health campaigns and proposes a specific policy to replace them.

The Voynich manuscript has been described as the most puzzling book ever written: its script matches no known alphabet, and its illustrations show plants that match no known species. Cryptographers have proposed that the text is an elaborate hoax, a cipher, or a natural language recorded in an invented alphabet. None of these proposals accounts for all the statistical regularities in the writing, and the manuscript remains unread.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

1. It describes a puzzle and predicts that new statistical methods will soon solve it.
2. It surveys several explanations of a problem, then introduces the problem those explanations were designed to solve.
3. It defends one explanation of a puzzle against two competing explanations.
4. It introduces an unsolved problem, surveys the main explanations proposed for it, and notes that none has succeeded.

Reviewers of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God faulted the novel for its dialect and its inward focus, and the book fell out of print. When Alice Walker wrote about searching for Hurston's unmarked grave, readers came to the novel with a different question: not whether it answered the arguments of its decade, but what it made possible for the writers who followed. The novel is now widely taught.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

1. It reports how a book was initially received, describes an event that changed how readers approached it, and notes the book's current standing.
2. It argues that the novel's early reviewers were right and that later readers misjudged the book.
3. It compares two novels and explains why one has lasted longer than the other.
4. It summarizes a novel's plot and then explains the author's method of recording dialect.

A common explanation for the collapse of the Bronze Age Mediterranean trade network points to a prolonged drought. Sediment cores from the region are consistent with a dry period, but the timing is imprecise, and drought alone does not explain why some cities were abandoned while neighbours a short distance away were not. Most researchers now treat drought as one pressure among several rather than as the cause.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

1. It presents a single explanation and then refutes it with new evidence.
2. It presents an explanation, identifies what the explanation cannot account for, and reports the qualified position researchers now hold.
3. It lists the several pressures that caused a collapse and ranks them by importance.
4. It contrasts evidence from sediment cores with evidence from written records.

Urban ecologists have generally assumed that city birds sing at higher pitches to be heard over traffic. Recordings from several European cities were consistent with that assumption. A researcher working in a quieter district then found the same high-pitched singing in birds far from any road, which suggests that pitch may be tracking something other than noise — perhaps the density of hard surfaces that reflect sound. The proposal has not been tested outside Europe.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

1. It describes a dispute between two research groups and takes the side of the newer one.
2. It presents an assumption and then shows that the evidence supporting it was fabricated.
3. It explains a widespread assumption, notes evidence consistent with it, presents an observation that complicates it, and marks the limits of the new proposal.
4. It reports a new finding and explains why it settles a long-running question.