When the history of women began to receive focused attention in the

OA FOR BOTH Q 2 and q 3 are incorrect

In que 3 , OA is E but green light is coming in option C bb

Can someone help me to understand que - 6

Hello arora1
Kanvi
prags1989

OAs has been updated.

Thanks

GMATNinja Why A is wrong? The only thing that I could come up with is the fact the "ideals held by the reformer" is different from sth that she actually took part of (her support both for labor laws protecting women and for appointments of women to high public office) Does that makes sense? tks!

The important thing about Scharf's book is that it examines ER's career in a broader social context.

To answer the question we're looking for a study that "proceeds in the same way" -- in other words, a study that places someone's career in a broader context.

Take another look at (A):
This study doesn't place the reformer in a broader societal context. It just talks about the reformer in relation to his/her OWN ideals.

Maybe the reformer's ideals align perfectly with ER's ideals, or maybe they do not -- that is completely irrelevant. Scharf's point is that you have to examine ER in the context of a bigger movement, and (A) doesn't do that at all. That's why you can eliminate (A) for question 2.

I hope that helps!

IMO because the question asks us to review the work from Scharf's point of view and not from the point of view that was widely accepted. Scharf's tone is positive towards Roosevelt and Answer choice C matches the overall negative tone towards her life.
According to Scharf, Roosevelt was much more than what she was thought to be. She is knows for his own View points and not what historians think about her. Same way Answer choice D talks about Athlete's motivation as her own and not based on her environment or any other factors.
So Answer choice D would be the right choice.

GMATNinja
Dear sir,
Reagarding question 2, I am confused for option E: "A history of the individuals who led the movement to end slavery in the United States which attributed the movement's success to the efforts of those exceptional individuals"
Why is it wrong?

exceptional individuals = a generation of privileged women. Should it mean that ER involved in the movement at a broader social context?

Question 2

How does Scharf's book interpret Eleanor Roosevelt's career?

To shed some light this question, notice how the author presents Scharf's book in contrast to Lash's. So to understand Scharf, we should probably understand Lash as well.

More specifically, notice that Lash presents Roosevelt as an "idiosyncratic figure," but NOT as a "figure comprehensible in terms of broader social developments." Scharf, by contrast, depicts Roosevelt in a "more richly detailed context" which allows her to be "intelligible in terms of this social context."

Examining the description of Scharf's book more closely supports this idea. That is, Scharf's book presents Roosevelt as part of a "generation of privileged women." The passage goes on to describe the characteristics of this generation, and how they make Roosevelt's activities "intelligible."

So basically, where Lash presents Roosevelt WITHOUT reference to "broader social developments," Scharf presents Roosevelt in the "social context" of a "generation of privileged women."

Let's now consider (E):

Scharf describes Roosevelt (an individual) in relation to her social context. Does (E) do that?

Not really. In a way, it gets the relationship backwards. It attributes the success of a movement to the efforts of exceptional individuals. But Scharf is describing an individual in relation to her social context.

From another angle: the author tells us that Lash presents Roosevelt as both "idiosyncratic" and "somehow self-generated." In other words, instead of explaining her in terms of her social surroundings, Lash explains Roosevelt as unique and self-made. Scharf does just the opposite, explaining Roosevelt through the social context of a "privileged generation."

Going back to the answer choice: notice the individuals presented in (E) are described as "exceptional," which sounds more like Lash (who thought Roosevelt was "idiosyncratic") than Scharf. In other words, if you describe someone as "exceptional," that implies they are really unique, or different from their social context, not a part of it. At the same time, although we're told the individuals in (E) belonged to a social movement, this social movement is NOT used to explain them.

For both those reasons, we can eliminate (E).

I hope that helps!

Dear Experts

I have not completely understood the correct answer choice of Question 2. It looks almost impossible for me to comprehend such statements in the test environment, when you have limited time.
Request you to explain how can I approach such questions by using the process of elimination.

The discussion in this thread goes off in various divergent directions, so I'll try to provide a summary answer for each question.

First—as usual in RC—let's go through the passage to create a short, high-level summary. One major use of the resulting outline of notes is to help predict the answers to big-picture (whole-passage) questions, so, we don't want to include anything that's too finely detailed to reasonably factor into one of the whole-passage questions.

¶1:
Eleanor Roosevelt '70's:
—accomplished
—but famous as president's Wife (as in Lash's works)

¶2:
Lash (70s): Didn't tie ER to the larger society
Scharf (1987): ER and other Women = life of contradictions (|| contradictions between changing female roles)



Now let's dig into the questions...


The summary outline above keeps the big ideas of this passage and filters out the details. Accordingly, we should be able to check the answer choices against it and take the one that's fully supported by it.



This choice is FULLY SUPPORTED. ER's life was understood in one way by Lash and others in the 1970s (only in relation to her husband, and not as a mirror of anything in society more generally), but then in an altogether different way by Scharf and others in 1987 (without reference to her husband, and indeed in a way that reflected the changing roles of [at least more privileged] Women more broadly).

This one's the winner.



"Social reform" is mentioned only as a single detail in ¶1. The passage does not explain anything that made that situation possible, so this choice is unsupported.

Furthermore, this choice doesn't even touch the content of ¶2.




Nope—it's limited to Eleanor Roosevelt. In fact, ¶1 explicitly points out that Lash & contemporaries formed their views of ER specifically WITHOUT any reference to[i] the greater female experience of the time.

Quote:

(D) Social changes that resulted from the activities of Eleanor Roosevelt

Completely unsupported. Not one word about anything that [i]resulted FROM ER's doings.

Scharf & contemporaries note contradictions in the lives of ER's class of Women—implying a reflection of broader conflicts wrought by changing female roles—but there's no indication that they saw a cause/effect relationship in either direction.




Unsupported for essentially the same reasons as choice C.

The main point of Scharf's work is to cast the life of Eleanor Roosevelt in a greater social context, rather than in a strictly personal context. In other words, Scharf pointed out relations between ER's life and what was happening more broadly with her segment of society.

Accordingly, we have a CONCRETE GOAL here:
We need to find an answer choice that relates someone's life to the situation of a larger group to which that person belongs.



Let's look at the choices to see which one satisfies this goal.

4

Nope. Nothing about a larger social group; these "ideals" are still strictly personal.




Still nothing about a broader group. This choice actually works just like option A, but for a handful of people rather than for just one person. Still stays within the context of those same people's personal values/goals.




Absolutely what we want. The senator's own goals reflected those of a much broader social group to which he is explicitly stated to have belonged

Winner!




Functionally identical to choice A. Stays within the context of one person and her immediate family, with no attempt to draw any parallels to a larger-scale social group.




This one is backwards. We want a choice that sheds light upon the accomplishments or values of an individual by finding parallels in a broader context; this choice, by contrast, sheds light upon a broader movement via parallels to the NARROWER context of certain key individuals within it.

Some questions of this type require a connection that's located elsewhere in the passage. I.e., for "evidence against...", you might need to locate the '70's view of ER and then find something elsewhere that contrasts with it.

Others, however, contain the required relationship right there within a single area, using transition words to indicate it. Here, this would mean using contrast-related transition words to link the '70's view of ER directly to something that contrasts with it.

For efficiency's sake, we should look for the latter type of relationship first, and only go further afield if we don't find it.


The 1970s view of ER is at the very beginning of the passage. This turns out to be the latter, more compact type of relationship—with the contrasting evidence we need right there, linked by the word "despite":
Despite the evidence that she had been important in social reform circles before her husband was elected President and that she continued to advocate different causes than he did, ((back to stuff from the '70s view))


So there's our answer!
• Politically important before becoming First Lady
• Stood for causes other than her husband's

That's exactly what is written in the last choice:

None of the other choices are anywhere close. E is the winner.

An organized approach to this question has two main steps:
• Find where the passage talks about that generation of feminists;
• Locate a contrast.

The required contrasting idea could show up in either of two ways—which, again, we should try to find in order of efficiency:
—The passage may directly state it ("Unlike that generation of feminists..." "That generation of feminists did not..." etc.)
—Alternatively, we might need to find something that WAS true of those feminists, whose opposite appears as an answer choice.


For efficiency's sake we should look for the former of these first. Indeed, we find it—near the beginning of the second paragraph:
However, [ER] still appeared to be an idiosyncratic figure, somehow self-generated not amenable to any generalized explanation. She emerged from the biography as a mother to the entire nation, or as a busybody, but hardly as a social type, a figure comprehensible in terms of broader social developments. But more recent work on the feminism of the post-suffrage years (following 1920) allows us to see Roosevelt in a different light...

Any of the stuff in this color could constitute a correct answer to this problem. Which choice has some of it?



Yup.



Nope to the others:

"Mentions" unmistakably means we're looking for an answer choice that repeats exactly what the passage says—maybe with different words, insofar as it's possible to change the wording without any real change to the meaning of the words.
So, let's just 'collect' the possible answers to this question from the explicit text of the passage, and then look for the same stuff in an answer choice.

There are exactly two specific pairs of contradictory observations given to illustrate this statement:
• They maintained female social networks but began to integrate women into mainstream politics
• They demanded equal treatment but also argued that women’s maternal responsibilities made them both wards and representatives of the public interest



All we need to do at this point is go find an answer choice containing one of these two contradictory pairs.

That's the last choice, which contains the first of the two pairs:

"Crediting" something/someone is done EXPLICITLY—much like "mentioning" in the question immediately preceding this one. So, again, this should be something we can look up in the passage, and then find duplicated in one of the answer choices.

We're looking for something that allowed historians to move from the previous understanding (that of the 1970s) to the current one, so, logically, we should find it at the transition point between those two sets of ideas. Indeed we do:
But more recent work on the feminism of the post-suffrage years (following 1920) allows us to see Roosevelt in a different light

That's our target answer: "more recent work on the feminism of the post-suffrage years (following 1920)"
We just need to find this as an answer choice.

Take care to get the specs correct: we want MORE RECENT WORK (from closer to the present—i.e., NOT anything actually written back in the 1920s) on FEMINISM OF THE 1920s.

That's exactly what is in our winning choice:


The only other choice that comes anywhere close to resembling the correct one is B:
This isn't what we want, however, because it's not MORE RECENT WORK. Instead, this is the original source material from that actual period, which we don't want in this instance.

10 mins. 5 correct except for Q2.
I am not sure if there was a clear feminist movement but when I read it again, it kind of made sense