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PART V READING COMPREHENSION (25 MIN)
In this section there are four passages followed by questions or unfinished statements, each with four suggested answers marked [A], [B], [C] and [D]. Choose the one that you think is the best answer.
Mark your answers on your ANSWER SHEET.
TEXT A
It is possible for students to obtain advanced degree in English while knowing little or nothing about traditional scholarly methods. The consequences of this neglect of traditional scholarship are particularly unfortunate for the study of women writers. If the canon-the list of authors whose works are most widely taught-is ever to include more women, scholars must be well trained in historical scholarship and textual editing. Scholars who do not know how to read early manuscripts, locate rare books, establish a sequence of editions, and so on are lacking crucial tools for revising the canon.
To address such concerns, an experimental version of the traditional scholarly methods course was designed to raise students’ consciousness about the usefulness of traditional learning for any modern critic or theorist. To minimize the artificial aspects of the conventional course, the usual procedure of assigning a large number of small problems drawn from the entire range of historical periods was abandoned, though this procedure has the obvious advantage of at least superficially familiarizing students with; a wide range of reference sources.① Instead students were engaged in a collective effort to do original work on a neglected eighteenth century writer, Elizabeth Griffith, to give them an authentic experience of literary scholarship and to inspire them to take responsibility for the quality of their own work.
Griffith’s work presented a number of advantages for this particular pedagogical purpose. First, the body of extant scholarship on Griffith was so tiny that it could be all read in a day, thus students spent little time and effort mastering the literature and had a clear field for their own discoveries. Griffith’s play-The Platonic Wife exists in three visions, enough to provide illustrations of editorial issues but not too many for beginning students to manage. In addition, because Griffith was successful in the eighteenth century, as her continued productivity and favorable reviews demonstrate, her exclusion from the canon and virtual disappearance from literary history also helped raise issues concerning the current canon.
The range of Griffith’s work meant that each student could become the world’s leading authority on a particular Griffith text. For example, a student studying Griffith’s Wife in the Right obtained a first edition of the play and studied it for some weeks. This student was suitably shocked and outraged to find its title transformed into A Wife in the Night in Watt’s Bibliotheca Britannica. Such experiences, inevitable and common in working on a writer to whom so little attention has been paid serve to vaccinate the students-I hope for a lifetime-against credulous use of reference sources.②
81. The author of the passage is primarily concerned with ______.
A. revealing a commonly ignored deficiency
B. proposing a return to traditional method
C. describing an attempt to correct a shortcoming
D. assessing the success of a new pedagogical approach
82. Which of the following is a disadvantage of the strategy employed in the experimental scholarly methods course?
A. Students were not given an opportunity to study women writers outside the canon.
B. Students had little background knowledge for further research.
C. Most of the students in the course had little opportunity to study 18th century literature.
D. Students were not given an opportunity to encounter certain sources of information that could prove useful in their future studies.
83. The "particular pedagogical purpose" mentioned in Paragraph 3 is to ______.
A. minimize the trivial aspects of the traditional scholarly methods course
B. encourage scholarly rigor in students’ own research
C. reestablish Griffith’s reputation as an author
D. bridge the gap between the new method and the traditional approach
84. It can be inferred that the author expects, that the experience of the student mentioned as having studied Wife in the Right would have the effect that ______.
A. it would lead the student to have a clear understanding of the editors
B. it would teach the student to question the accuracy of certain kinds of information sources when studying neglected authors
C. it would teach the student to avoid the use of reference sources in studying neglected authors D. it would enhance the student’s appreciation of the works of authors not include in the canon
85. What is the function of the last paragraph in relation to the passage as a whole?
A. It summarizes the benefits students can derive from the experimental scholarly methods course.
B. It provides additional reasons why Griffith’s works raises issues having to do with the canon of authors.
C. It provides an illustration of the immediate nature of the experiences students can derive from the experimental scholarly methods course.
D. It contrasts the experience of a student in the experimental scholarly methods course with the experience of a student in the traditional course.
