Here, I understand why we picked naive. But I’m just trying to clarify the thought process of when we choose extreme words vs. simple math strategy- and how to recognise such cases.
So here, if it were a normal math strategy case, the sentence would say, “We knew John was young and impressionable, thus (support) we were suprised by his ingeniousness.”
And here, since the sentence is setting up a contrast between young/ impressionable and surprides by ____- thus we use an extreme word. Makes sense?
We knew J was young, but (contrast) we were surprised at his maturity. –> simple math strategy requiring contrast between young/impressionable and blank
We knew J was young, but (contrast) we were nevertheless (contrast) surprised at how naive he was. –> double contrast making blank similar in meaning to young/impressionable
Same as: I knew she was beautiful, but (-) I was nevertheless (-) surprised by how gorgeous she looked. = I knew she was beautiful and I was surprised by how gorgeous she looked.
I personally don’t think this is about using an extreme word because the choice here is based on meaning rather than stylistic fit.
I could be wrong, so I’m tagging @Alina because I am not 100% confident with my reply.
Trying to grasp what you’re saying, so basically you’re saying it’s about understanding the meaning of the sentence and recognising if this is an extreme case, vs. a simple math strategy. If I may replay my understanding by taking this same example-
A simple math strategy to this sentence will be:
Although he was young and inexperienced, he was actually quite mature.
Vs. an extreme case is similar to how the QQ phrased it:
Although he was young and inexperienced, we were shocked by his gullibility.
What is a little unclear still in my mind is: If in the simple math strategy case, I introduce the word “shocked”, which as you pointed out introduces a doubel contrast- would mature still work?
“Although he was young and inexperienced, we were shocked by his maturity”?- is this correct?
I don’t think shocked is the contrast word here but the word ‘although’. He was young but (-) we were shocked at how mature he was. = Although he was young, he was mature.
Got it, so here, if taking your first example, we have to predict a word, we would treat it like a double possibility?
He was young but (-) :
we were shocked at how mature he was
we were shocked by how naive he was
Is this correct understanding? The Big Book QQ has 2 such options: (1) Naivete, and (2) ingeniousness - where we choose naivete. I guess I’m still not clear why we would choose naivete here
@kavi Sorry for the delay! This one is a bit of a doozy grammatically.
In the screenshotted video (the Old GRE Walkthrough, test 4, section 4, question 3), Greg describes the problem as an “extreme” one due to the phrase “but were nevertheless surprised”, where the “surprised” is really what makes it into an extreme indicator–“but nevertheless” by itself isn’t sufficient to imply intensity.
Taken alone, the phrase “but nevertheless” is a redundant phrase. The individual words “but” and “nevertheless” don’t cancel each other out, instead they work to emphasize the same point as a single contrast.
For example, we can eliminate the “but” and retain the meaning:
“We realized that John was still young and impressionable; nevertheless, we were surprised at his (i) _______”
The reason this feels surprising is because normally, we’d expect the contrast to be with the described personality traits. Instead, the contrast here is with the speaker’s realization that John held those traits. This realization created an expectation for how John would act, and combined with the “surprised”, it indicates his behavior exceeded that expectation–he was even more young and impressionable than they had thought.
Here is another rephrasing of the sentence that makes the contrast clearer:
“Despite knowing that John was still young and impressionable, we were nevertheless surprised at his ——”
By replacing the “but” with “despite”, and moving it to the beginning of the sentence, we can see how the two contrast words (despite and nevertheless) work together to indicate a more extreme ending for the sentence.
