Reading comp PrepTest 121 · Section 3 · Question 4

Topic: Social Science

Paragraph 1

• Paragraph note
  • Question posed; Anthropologists Answer
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Question - Why did our earliest ancestors - especially the Aurignacians - create art?
  • Some Anthropologists - Lived a more secure life than Neanderthals and appreciated luxury; other supported these artists

Paragraph 2

• Paragraph note
  • Paradox that questions completeness of above answer
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Paradox (“Curiously”) - Paintings in very inaccessible areas without natural light - If the art was only to be appreciated, why put it there?

Paragraph 3

• Paragraph note
  • Another answer; Author provides support
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Other Anthropologists - Also to secure steady food; give power over animals (images of heart and arrows to organs); plentiful hunting grounds (pregnant animals)
  • Example - Mammoths and bison
  • Rituals performed by images - Dancer footprints and images of shamans

Main Point: The art of early humans - especially the Aurignacians - was probably meant to both show a love of beauty/pride in artistry and provide a means for these hunter-gatherers to ensure a steady food supply and power over the animals they hunted.

Lines 1-4 - Question

Lines 4-5 - Subset of group we’ll get an answer for is introduced

Lines 17-22 - One answer

Lines 23-28 - Paradox that questions whether answer is complete (“simply out of”; “sole purpose”)

Lines 34-37 - Another answer that supplements first

Question/Answer - The passage starts out by explicitly mentioning a question - why did our early ancestors create art? When a question is posed at the beginning of a passage, there’s a good chance that the Author is going to explore answers to that question, and the Author’s preferred answer (or her opinion on a key answer, if she doesn’t take a side) serves as the main point. Here, it would be very easy to misinterpret the Author in this passage as siding with the answer offered by the second set of Anthropologists over the first. However, there are two signs that the Author believes that they both are at least partially correct. The first is that Paragraph 2, where the Author calls into question the viewpoint from Paragraph 1, says that the evidence she presents only questions whether aesthetic enjoyment was the “sole purpose” of the paintings (Lines 28-29), suggesting that aesthetic enjoyment could be one purpose but just not the entire purpose. The second is in Paragraph 3, where she says that other Anthropologists argue that the paintings were also intended to ensure a steady food supply (Lines 34-37). That “also” thrown in there suggests this group of anthropologists's answer to the initial question is additive of the answer provided by the other anthropologists, not an alternative. And since the Author uses language suggesting she agrees with this view (Lines 43-44; Lines 50-51; Lines 51-53 all see the Author presenting evidence for this view instead of stating that the evidence is what the Anthropologists cite), we can infer that she, too, believes that both answers to the question capture a purpose behind the art, as reflected in our summary of the main point above.

List - Paragraph 3 has a list of things that the second set of anthropologists say the Aurignacians believed about their cave paintings - reasons other than an appreciation of art that they painted. These are all meant to support their answer to why the Aurignacians painted - to provide a means of ensuring a steady food supply. We’ll likely get a few questions about this list!

Example - Paragraph 3 has a list of animals that the Aurignacians hunted and, thus, ones that would be depicted in their paintings. It would be super easy to miss this example (“such as,” line 43), but that’s when examples are most dangerous! We should note it in case it shows up in a question.

It would be easy to misinterpret this passage as falling into the Generalization/Example Meta-Structure, as it starts with a broad question about the purpose our early ancestors had in making art and then transitions to a discussion of a specific group of our early ancestors - the Aurignacians. However, the passage never says that the purposes behind this group’s art are indicative of the purposes that all of our ancestors had. Rather than using an example to illustrate a general point, this passage answers a general question for one specific subset. This is important to note because we need to limit our answers to ones that focus on the Aurignacians, or general answers that talk about “some” early ancestors.