Read the passage first
The lesson below refers to this passage.
Why the Filter Changed
Overview
Text structure is the relationship among parts, not just their order on the page. A writer may present a judgment, identify its weakness, and revise the method of evaluation. Another may arrange material by a process even when its sources come from different times. Identify what each paragraph contributes to the whole.
“Why the Filter Changed” moves from favorable taste comments to a distinction between taste and safety, then to separate measures. A survey answers a perception question; a laboratory test addresses required qualities. Treating them as interchangeable ignores what each can establish. The posted maintenance schedule adds the need for continuing attention after installation. The broader main idea is to match evidence to its question, not to reject surveys or testing.
“Who Speaks in the Exhibit?” follows a ship's role from construction through waterfront labor to goods in town. Birth-date order would serve biography, but the chosen order serves a process. Because the accounts come from different decades, date labels prevent the display from pretending to describe one voyage. A smoother story could therefore be less accurate. The visitor's question prompts the explanation of this organizing decision; it does not prove that process order is wrong.
For a new passage, describe each paragraph with a verb: introduces, illustrates, qualifies, distinguishes, responds, or concludes. Then explain the connection. Avoid an answer that labels the whole text chronological simply because events appear in sequence. Check whether that sequence represents time, causal dependence, or a conceptual process. Summaries and inferences also depend on structure: preserving the qualification may be more important than retaining an attractive narrative of one continuous event.
Apply the method to a complete new context
Read the whole passage before choosing an answer.
Who Speaks in the Exhibit?
The museum's new harbor exhibit began with a shipbuilder's account of launching a vessel. It described careful measurement and the relief of seeing the hull float. Next came a dockworker's recollection of unloading cargo in rain. The exhibit ended with a shopkeeper's notes about the goods arriving in town.
A visitor asked why the museum had not arranged the accounts by their authors' birth dates. The curator explained that the sequence followed the ship's movement from construction to work on the waterfront to effects in the town. The exhibit was tracing a process rather than writing three biographies.
That arrangement made connections visible, but it had a limitation. The accounts came from different decades, so the exhibit could not present them as eyewitness descriptions of one voyage. Labels identified each date and explained that the sequence illustrated related activities across time.
The visitor returned to the first panel. Read as a single voyage, the display would tell a smoother story. Read with its labels, it told a more careful one: several voices described parts of a harbor's life without claiming that they had stood together on the same pier.
In the final paragraph, “voices” means A. individual accounts and perspectives. B. assigned acting roles. C. recorded pier sounds. D. spoken visitor instructions.
The supported answer is A: individual accounts and perspectives. The voices are the shipbuilder, dockworker, and shopkeeper’s accounts; no audio or reenactment is described.
Read each wrong choice in context and find what it changes: the meaning, an unsupported claim, or the grammar.