(C)

@Julie-V, Great question. When dealing with an answer choice that contains a word you're unfamiliar with, first check to see if that word was brought up at all in the passage. If it was, read the text around the word to see if you can figure out what it means by context. If it's not in the passage, then focus on the other answer choices first. If you know what those words mean, see if they match up to what the question is asking for. This can happen from time to time, but using a strategy like the one you used to correctly answer this question is a solid way of tackling it. Does this make sense? Let us know if you have any other questions!

what do you do if you are unfamiliar with multiple words ? (I experience that a lot )

I think I would recommend three things. First, you should do whatever you can to expand your vocabulary. There's really no better way to do this than by reading a lot, so the prime goal I would say is to just read. That said, that's not helpful in the moment when you see an unfamiliar word. I think there are two things you can do. First I'd recommend just replacing the word with "blah blah blah" and trying to figure out the general direction of the word from context. Let's try this with the word perniciousness in the first paragraph. From context, we are told that imagination is good but academic historians leave little to the imagination, and they sap the vitality of students. From this, we can assume that perniciousness is directionally bad. This doesn't get us to a dictionary definition but it does give us a decent enough working understanding of the sentence. That said, when the word is isolated in an answer choice, we can't do this. In that cast etymology is really our only bet. That is, does it sounds like other words you do know?