rk0510 wrote:
B & C can be strengtheners because the argument is assuming that year of disruption and year of production are same and they reiterate that and allow for that possibility. Where am i going wrong here? Could you please explain?
This question is a weird question. Even (D) does not do much to strengthen the argument.
So, what we need is the best choice, not one that is a clear strengthener.
(B) is not great. We already know that the plague occurred in 1148, and we have no reason to believe that a 10 month plague is more clearly connected to the disruption of the copying than, say, a two month plague. A plague is not going to be a one day thing, I don't think. So, common sense tells us it would have disrupted the copying whether it was tenth months long or lasted some other length of time.
So, while, sure, (B) confirms that the plague lasted long enough to disrupt the process, since common sense tells us that any notable plague would probably last long enough to do so, (B) doesn't add much.
(C) works in a similar way. Yes, (C) confirms that the copying would have occurred in one year, which could have been 1148. At the same time, common sense already tells us that, probably, copying an 80 page document is not going to take multiple years. I guess it could but, even so, maybe it could have been disrupted during one of those years.
So, (C), like (B), sort of tightens up the time frame for us, but really doesn't add much.
Thus, (D), which eliminates the possibility that such a plague occurred often during those times, is the best of some pretty weak choices.
In the passage, the author makes a jump when he says there was some sort of disruption and that happened in 1148. Therefore, the treatise was produced in 1148. Clearly, he is assuming that the year of production and the year of disruption are same. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense that just because there was a disruption in 1148, the book must have been produced in that particular year. Now (B) gives us a reason to believe that while there was a disruption, it wasn't that long, so probably the treatise was produced in the same year as disruption, as the work that needed to be done post disruption wasn't that much. So probably, 1148 was the year of production.