16Hit1600
Craft and StructureVery hardTwo authors on the value of a method

Craft and Structure practice question

Text 1 Historian Marc Delacroix holds that oral histories are too unreliable to use: memories fade, stories improve in the telling, and no two witnesses agree. Text 2 Oral histories are unreliable about dates and sequences, but they preserve what documents rarely do — how events felt to those living through them. Used alongside the written record, and not as a substitute for it, they add a dimension no archive contains.

Based on the texts, the author of Text 2 would most likely respond to Delacroix by arguing that ____

  1. A. the weaknesses he identifies are real but do not cancel the distinctive value oral histories have when used with documents.Correct
  2. B. oral histories are more accurate than documents.
  3. C. memories never fade.
  4. D. archives should be closed to historians.

Answer: A. the weaknesses he identifies are real but do not cancel the distinctive value oral histories have when used with documents.

'Unreliable about dates … but'; 'used alongside the written record'.

Why the other answers are wrong

B. oral histories are more accurate than documents.
Text 2 grants their unreliability on facts.
C. memories never fade.
Text 2 accepts that they are unreliable about dates and sequences.
D. archives should be closed to historians.
Text 2 values the written record.

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