Offical Explanation -
It’s agreed that adults raised under the practice of punishing a child by sitting him alone outdoors showed no less confidence than adults not so raised—this, despite the feeling among child psychologists that that punishment causes damage to self-esteem, which in turn leads to less confidence. Let’s go through the choices as you doubtless did, in order, looking for that which must be true based on this text.
(A) goes too far. The author stops short of drawing the categorical conclusion that the child psychologists are wrong.
(B)—the last sentence talks about average levels of confidence, not (as
(B) does) the extremes.
(C) distorts a most tangential aspect of the paragraph, namely the passersby observing a punished child. That it’s tangential doesn’t make
(C) wrong; it’s just that the author is concerned with the effects of the punishment, not its meaning to observers.
(D) commits the classic error of negating an if thens terms without flipping the terms. That lower self-esteem leads to less confidence doesn’t mean
that high self-esteem leads to high confidence. The correct formulation would be: “NOT less confidence leads to NOT lower self-esteem.”
(E) is all that’s left, and its conditional nature makes it easier to accept as true than the others. It distinguishes between the general tendency (of lower self-esteem leading to lower adult confidence)
and the particular behavior, which
(E) properly cites as an exception to that tendency.
(E) readily follows from the text.
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Regards,
Gladi
“Do. Or do not. There is no try.” - Yoda (The Empire Strikes Back)