Difficult Critical Reading question from the CB blue book

Europeen
Sat, 15 Sep 2012 18:06:11 +0000

Thanks! I don’t quite get the reasoning process here, though…

My reasoning was:

1. “wild” must mean something like “great”

2. It’s great and the real estate people want to use it to set up a “heaven”, so it must be positive and relate in some way to real estate, e.g. scenic location. Perhaps they want to make it a heaven as in “holiday mansions situated within a beautiful scenery”.

How is this kind of thinking fallacious?

At any rate, I’ve got yet another question…

<i munched="" in="" silence,="" watching="" the="" trees="" ripple="" wind="" and="" musing="" over="" latest="" a="" series="" of="" “controversial”="" symposiums="" i="" had="" attended="" that="" morning.="" speaker,="" an="" antiquated="" professor="" suspenders="" mismatched="" cardigan,="" delivered="" earnest="" diatribe="" against="" modern="" tools="" convenience="" like="" electronic="" mail="" instant="" messaging="" programs.="" thought="" his="" speech="" was="" interesting,="" but="" altogether="" too="" romantic.=""> <i munched="" in="" silence,="" watching="" the="" trees="" ripple="" wind="" and="" musing="" over="" latest="" a="" series="" of="" “controversial”="" symposiums="" i="" had="" attended="" that="" morning.="" speaker,="" an="" antiquated="" professor="" suspenders="" mismatched="" cardigan,="" delivered="" earnest="" diatribe="" against="" modern="" tools="" convenience="" like="" electronic="" mail="" instant="" messaging="" programs.="" thought="" his="" speech="" was="" interesting,="" but="" altogether="" too="" romantic.="">


The sentence in which “controversial” appears indicates that the narrator considers the word to be


(A) WRONG
(B) WRONG
(C) an impression
(D) an overstatement
(E) an epithet

My guess would have been (E), the epithet. Why? The narrator mentions the symposiums he attended had been a series of “controversial” ones, meaning “controversial” is used to describe every single one of them. Now, when one looks at the definition of epithet (something like a defining or characteristic adjective with which you can identify something) its meaning clearly applies here. We’ve got a series of symposiums, their main characteristic being that each is one of the “controversial” lectures, so why wouldn’t the narrator consider the word to be an epithet? I’m puzzled. The concept of “overstatement” is not even hinted at in the sentence we are supposed to look at (perhaps later in the passage but that’s not really relevant, is it?).

Finally, has anyone got a good method for approaching the “quotation mark questions”? I am having a lot of trouble with these generally, so some tips would be more than helpful. :)

Cheers and good luck studying for the SAT to y’all