Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Medium

PT103 S4 P2 Q12 Explanation

James Porter

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TopicsInferenceHumanities

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Passage

James Porter (1905–1970) was the first scholar to identify the African influence on visual art in the Americas, and much of what is known about the cultural legacy that African-American artists inherited from their African forebears has come to us by way of his work. Porter, a painter and art historian, began went on to establish clearly the range of the cultural territory inherited by later African-American artists.

An example of this aspect of Porter’s research occurs in his essay “Robert S. Duncanson, Midwestern Romantic-Realist.” The work of Duncanson, a nineteenth-century painter of the Hudson River school, like that of his predecessor in the movement, Joshua Johnston, was commonly thought to have been created by a Euro-American artist. Porter proved genre portrait with evidence of an extensive knowledge of the cultural history of various African peoples.

In his later years, Porter wrote additional chapters for later editions of his book, constantly revising and correcting his findings, some of which had been based of necessity on fragmentary evidence. Among his later achievements were his definitive reckoning of the birth year of the painter Patrick Reason, long a point of of the Western world generally, a body of research whose riches scholars still have not exhausted.

What this question is testing

Inference

Your task

Find what must be true based on what the passage or stimulus states.

Common trap

Answers that are plausible or likely but not actually guaranteed by the text.

Winning move

Keep only the choice the statements fully support — eliminate anything that requires an extra assumption.

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question
12.

The passage most strongly supports which one of the following inferences about

Answer choices

  1. Correct74% picked this

    They often contained figures or images derived from the work of

    Why this is right

    We were told that Porter made "a conscious effort to maintain ties [to African artisanship] in his own paintings". Does that mean that his paintings contained figure or images derived from the work of African artisans? No, not for sure, but that's a pretty conservative guess. Maybe his only tie to African artisanship was the color scheme or the brush choice? But given that he did genre portraits (paintings of figures/images) and that he was consciously maintaining ties to African artisanship, this is the most supportable inference up here. No other answer does as good a job at reinforcing the thing(s) we were told about Porter's own paintings.

    Skill tested: Inference · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

  2. Unsupported Causal Relationship7% picked this

    They fueled his interest in pursuing a career in

    We know very little about Porter's own paintings: - consciously maintained ties to African art - combined genre portrait with knowledge of African peoples Anything else we say about Porter's paintings would be speculative. These two ideas do not provide any support for the idea that his own paintings spurred his interest in an art history career.

  3. Unsupported Causal Relationship9% picked this

    They were used in Porter’s book to show the extent of African influence

    We know very little about Porter's own paintings: - consciously maintained ties to African art - combined genre portrait with knowledge of African peoples Anything else we say about Porter's paintings would be speculative. We don't know whether Porter used his own paintings in his book (that would be pretty immodest of him), and if he did, we don't know what his purpose in doing so was.

  4. Too Strong10% picked this

    They were a deliberate attempt to prove his theories about

    Too Strong: deliberate attempt to prove Reverses the Causal Sequence We're told that Porter's paintings (because they consciously tried to maintain ties to African art) led to him being good at writing art history that recognized the ties to African art. This reverses the causal order, and makes it sound like FIRST came the art history and THEN came the paintings to justify his theories. (This answer is also a hilarious story .... some scholar writes his theory about paintings by black artists and then tries to prove himself right by being a black artist who makes paintings that align with that theory?)

  5. Too Strong0% picked this

    They were done after all of his academic work had

    Too Strong: all Out of Scope: completed academic work We know very little about Porter's own paintings: - consciously maintained ties to African art - combined genre portrait with knowledge of African peoples Anything else we say about Porter's paintings would be speculative. We have no idea if he did his paintings once the work was done, or if he took breaks from his academic work to do some painting, or if he started each day with painting and then went into academic work.

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