Reading comp PrepTest 117 · Section 1 · Question 23

Topic: Humanities

Paragraph 1

• Paragraph note
  • Modern Movement; Author points out irony
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Modern Movement (MM) proponent - Better than what it replaced at reflecting 20th c technology and building methods
  • Author - Irony - MM at odds with how buildings are built

Paragraph 2

• Paragraph note
  • Author previews opinion; Background on MM
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Adherence to ideology → Decline of movement
  • Background - Motive - Not just interpret client needs, but teach/persuade them MM was better
  • Examples - Wagner, Wright
  • Critics - Ignored non-Modern aspects of these inventors

Paragraph 3

• Paragraph note
  • How MM declined
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Reason 1 - MMs were “ignorant of building methods”
  • Reason 2 - MMs didn’t admit they cared just about aesthetics
  • Reason 3 - Building industry moved to subcontractors, so more variation and MM methods couldn’t account for (e.g., expose structural elements = too expensive)

Paragraph 4

• Paragraph note
  • Next movement; MM’s decline
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Postmodernists - Exposing structural elements unnecessarily limiting
  • Author - MM declined because of failure to abandoned ideals

Main Point: Proponents of the Modern Movement caused the decline of their own movement by failing to abandon their ideals in the face of practical building considerations.

Lines 1-6 - New approach and proponents compare it to old approach

Lines 6-9 - Author’s view on movement (Irony)

Lines 10-12 - More on the Author’s (negative) view

Lines 31-40 - Author’s reasons for MM’s decline

Lines 58-60 - Another movement’s view of MM

Lines 60-63 - Author’s summary of viewpoint

Old Approach/New Approach - In many Humanities passages that don’t feature a focus on innovation, there’s a comparison of a new style to an old one, or a discussion of the influences on a new style. That focus is present here, with the Author presenting Modernists and the Modern Movement as believing that they “more accurately reflected” modern sensibilities than the historical styles they replaced (Lines 1-6), and the passage goes on to flesh the Author’s thoughts on this movement out. When this Old Approach/New Approach Meta-Structure defines a passage, the Author’s opinion of the new approach generally serves as the main point. Interestingly, while these passages usually take a positive stance on the new approach, the Author here takes a negative one! She says it’s “ironic” that their focus on building methods didn’t translate to how things are built (Lines 6-9), and that their “tenacious adherence” to their ideology led to their downfall (Lines 10-12). She ends by stating that their unwillingness to “abandon their ideals” led to the decline of their movement (Lines 60-63). So while she doesn’t say much about the aesthetic or ideological value of the movement, she has a lot of criticisms as to how they went about making buildings, which should be reflected in any main point.

Examples - The Author ends Paragraph 2 with a couple examples of Modern architects who were praised by the Modern Movement (Lines 25-30). Interestingly, these architects serve a different purpose in the Author’s argument - she shows that the attention paid to them ignored parts of their work that didn’t line up with Modern ideology (Lines 28-30). While normally we’d expect at most a single question about examples that take up such little space in the passage, the fact that the Author uses these examples as a part of an argument against the modernist critics might result in a question or two being asked on it.

List - Paragraph 3 features a list of reasons that the Author believes contributed to the decline of the Modern Movement (two in the opening sentence, one after “Moreover” that’s more fleshed out). Since these reasons constitute the entire paragraph, there’s a good chance that there will be at least one question asked about them.

The passage’s structure is a little slapdash. For example, Paragraph 2 starts out with a discussion of the movement’s decline, but it then goes into a long discussion of some history and motives in the MM. It’s not until Paragraph 3 that the Author circles back and justifies her stance that the ideological focus of Modernists led to the MM’s decline. We’ll need to keep that in mind as we address the questions, as there might be some where the support for the correct answer shows up in an unexpected place.