How do you solve such problems? What’s the best strategy to use here?
The word “that” signifies support before and after it. After “that”, we have the phrase “it takes as its subject matter the important events that have shaped and guided the culture”. This phrase can be used to deduce that the phrase before “that”(“Dramatic literature often__________the history of a culture in”) signifies a similar concept. The phrase “the history of a culture” is analogous to the phrase “the important events that have shaped and guided the culture”. “Recapitulates” fits the best here, which means to summarize or repeat. If you look at the other words, the logic of the sentence fails. For example, “confounds”, “repudiates” and “polarizes” respectively mean “to surprise”, “to reject”, or “to separate” which do not bring any meaningful interpretation to the sentence. “Anticipates” means to predict; dramatic literature predicting or anticipating the history doesn’t make any sense either. Hence the best option would be “recapitulates” which means to “summarize”.
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