Literary historian: William Shakespeare,

Answer choices

1. A

   Unsupported: Bacon wrote the dramas6% picked this

   Bacon wrote the dramas attributed to Shakespeare, but could not have written

   We have no way to prove that Bacon wrote the dramas. We only know he's a possibility, since he meets a necessary requirement of whoever it was that did write the dramas. We also have zero clue whether Bacon did / didn't write the love poetry attributed to Shakespeare. There's no accident that this answer is (A). They know when their paragraphs are causing students to think thoughts, and they love to put an illegal answer that sounds like what the students were feeling in spot (A) (on Inference questions).

   6%
2. B

   Unsupported: Bacon wrote the dramas2% picked this

   Bacon wrote both the love poetry and the dramas attributed

   We have no way to prove that Bacon wrote the dramas. We only know he's a possibility, since he meets a necessary requirement of whoever it was that did write the dramas. We also have zero clue whether Bacon did / didn't write the love poetry attributed to Shakespeare.

   2%
3. C

   Unsupported: didn't write love poetry3% picked this

   Shakespeare wrote neither the love poetry nor the dramas attributed

   We know for a fact that Shakespeare didn't write the dramas (we applied the conditional rule and derived it). But we don't know whether Shakespeare did or didn't write the love poetry. The author indicated that Shakespeare could have written it, so it's an open question.

   3%
4. D

   Too Strong: couldn't be one person7% picked this

   One person could not have written both the love poetry and the dramas

   Why couldn't it be one person? We don't have any information about what needs to be true about the person who wrote the love poetry. It's certainly possible that someone who wrote the love poetry also hung out with rulers and thus was able to write the dramas as well.

   7%
5. E

   Correct82% picked this

   Shakespeare may have written the love poetry but did not write the dramas

   Why this is right

   The first half of this just repeats the very first sentence. The second half is the inference we derived by combining the fact that "Shakespeare didn't associate with rulers" with the fact that "the dramas attributed to Shakespeare could only be written by someone who associated with rulers".

   Skill tested: Must be True · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

   82%