Reading Comprehension

PT140 · S4 · P3 · Q16 The Origins of Superior Performance

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In certain fields of human endeavor, such as music, chess, and some athletic activities, the performance of the best practitioners is so outstanding, so superior even to the performance of other highly experienced individuals in the field, that some people believe some notion of innate talent must be invoked to account for this highest level of performance.

Topic

Superior performance (the super elite athletes, performers, specialists, in any given field).

Frameworks

Answer a Question What causes elite performance? Some people - innate talent Author -- Nah, mostly acquired skills

Old / New Old - we used to assume elite performance came from innate talent. New - now we think it comes from mostly acquired skills

Challenge a Position Position -- some notion of innate talent must be invoked to explain why elite performers are so much better than their peers. Author's Challenge -- no, the real difference-makers are motivation and practice. The elite performers had all the necessary traits and just added 10+ years of intense training.

Main Point

Superior performance is probably less about innate talent and more about skills / physiological changes acquired through long, intense training, for which motivation may be the best predictor.

P1 - Intro to Topic, Position 1 (Old)

This paragraph introduces the concept of superior performance, then introduces the Position that the passage will be challenging: innate talent must be part of what explains elite performance. This view is supplemented with some data.

P2 - Pivot to New, Evidence against Old

We get a doubleheader Purpose Pivot (but, yet, however, recently). This introduces the New position, which the Author will ultimately endorse: acquired skills are the bigger part of elite performance,

The author shows evidence against the idea that the magic abilities of elite performers are innate gifts, rather than specialized capacities gained through training.

P3 - Evidence Supporting New

Here the author talks about how all these elite performers had over a decade of intense training. The paragraph suggests that training brings about these superpowers. You can get the chess master's mind or you can get the fast twitch fibers of whatever sporting action you're perfecting, if you train hard for at least a decade. Only some traits like height are beyond the reach of being acquired through training.

P4 - Summary of Challenge

The author makes more explicit that she accepts this New explanation (elite performance comes mainly through acquired factors) as the truth and then she speculates on an implication of that view: if elite performance is mainly based on how much you practice, then motivation is really the special sauce of the masters.

16.

Which one of the following can most reasonably be inferred from the passage?

Correct
In at least some fields
Why this is right
We can ignore the "or perhaps even impossible", because an author isn't ever committing to a perhaps idea. If we say, "Billy is going to have a great game today, perhaps he'll even hit the winning shot!", we've only committed to the idea that he's going to have great game today. The only way we would be wrong is if he didn't have a great game. The only way (A) could be wrong is if "in ALL fields of human endeavor, it would be easy to tell whether a superior performer, who had been extensively trained, has exceptional innate talent". All it takes for (A) to be right is at least one example where it would be tricky to tell whether a superior performer who has had extensive training started off with exceptional innate talent. Because this answer choice is saying something so weak, it's pretty easy to agree with it. There isn't one specific line of the passage that provides good direct support, but it's more the gist of what this passage is all about. Our first sentence was about the idea that some people think that superior performers must have exceptional innate talent, but then the passage basically goes on to try to convince us it's really a murky, questionable speculation. Hence, it would be difficult to tell whether a highly trained superior performer was awesome because they had exceptional innate talent, or whether they just had sufficient innate capacity and then they trained themselves up into superior performance. The middle of the 2nd paragraph says that "Recent research .. suggests that exceptional performance arises predominantly from acquired skills and adaptations, not from innate abilities." The beginning of the 3rd paragraph says that "the vast majority of exceptional adult performers weren't exceptional as children". The middle of that paragraph says that "with intensive training, chess players who may not have superior innate capacities can acquire skills that circumvent basic limits on such [innate] factors as memory and the ability to process information". This is probably our best proof sentence for (A). In the field of chess, it would be difficult to look at highly trained master chess players and know whether they had exceptional innate talent (better than average memory and information processing) or whether they had normal innate abilities and "acquired skills that circumvent" those basic limits.
Skill tested: Inference · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.
25% picked this
Performance at the very highest
Too Strong: generally requires Opposite
The author doesn't carve out a distinction for the very highest level of performers, saying that they need both the innate and the training. The last paragraph is saying we don't need to invoke any notion of innate talent in order to explain the difference between good and outstanding.
11% picked this
Exceptional innate talent is a
Too Strong: prerequisite Opposite
The gist of the passage is that you don't need to assume that master performers had exceptional innate talent; it's possible they had very normal talents and trained their way into being superlative performers.
4% picked this
Exceptional innate talent is probably
Out of Scope: complacency
The one obstacle to superior performance identified in the last paragraph is that if someone isn't motivated to practice a ton, then that will be their obstacle to becoming a superior performer. There's no causal connection between having exceptional innate talent and therefore lacking motivation. If we're telling ourselves a story that "she's so good at X that she's bored by how much better she is than everyone else, so she doesn't bother practicing as much as others, gets complacent, and others pass her by", then we are not doing what we need to do which is to find supporting text in the passage to justify our answer. The passage does not bring up complacency at all.
1% picked this
The importance of motivation and
Too Strong
Too Strong: does not depend in any way Contradicted This sounds worryingly strong. The author said that motivational factors are likely to be better predictors of superior performance than is innate talent, but that's not as strong as saying innate talent has no bearing whatsoever. In fact, in the beginning of the last paragraph, the author says that "extended training, together with that level of talent common to all reasonably competent performers may suffice to explain good vs. outstanding". There, she is making it sound like superior performance does depend on having at least that level of innate talent common to all reasonably competent performers.
59% picked this

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