The correct answers are B and C. I incorrectly just chose C.
My biggest gripe with these problems is I feel there is no direction on how far you can infer things from passages.
From this passage, we see that “mistakes were frequently made”. Okay. This can include many things. While this can be misattributing authors, it can also include typos, spelling errors, getting the name of the book wrong, printing paper stock, etc. — there is no evidence here, in my opinion, that “B” was at all represented or inferred in this entire passage.
If “B” can be part of the right answer, then hell, I should be able to infer however far I want with whatever errors are possible when printing out title pages. I should be able to infer an alien species invaded earth and decreed all title pages should come with pink goo. This is ridiculous!
Yet it is one of the right answers.
Can anyone make a convincing case for why B is the right answer? Or more generally, how far you can infer with these freaking problems? GRE verbal just feels like voodoo guesswork BS. I’m incredibly angry about this.
ETS questions are very intentional about the limit within which you can infer.
In the last few sentences the information provided us is;
The title pages usually contained a list of earlier works by the author
This list would often be made last minute, without assent from the author, and mistakes were prone to happen
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Keeping in mind the entire reason this passage is written is to discuss why attribution was difficult, these points are important.
From them we can infer what problems would likely occur.
They were written without the authors assent, were rushed, and had mistakes in them.
You have to ask, what types of mistakes could be possible, regarding attribution. This is entirety of the scope within which you can infer, because that’s essentially the only “open door” you’ve been given.
And there’s basically only two possibilities;
Either the list is incomplete i.e does not contain all the authors works
Or the list includes works that were not written by the author
And as we see, B correlates directly with number 2
I’d recommend trying to spot those statements that allow for inference before ever even reading what the options are. It’s a muscle you can build
