16Hit1600
Information and IdeasVery hardMain idea: a cartographer's blank spaces

Information and Ideas practice question

The eighteenth-century mapmaker left the interior of the continent blank where he had no reports, though his rivals filled theirs with invented mountains and rivers copied from one another. Buyers preferred the full maps. His sold poorly, and he died in debt. It is his map, with its honest emptiness, that the explorers of the next century carried, because it did not lie to them about what they would find.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

  1. A. The mapmaker's refusal to invent what he did not know cost him in his lifetime but made his map the one later explorers trusted.Correct
  2. B. Eighteenth-century maps were full of invented features.
  3. C. The mapmaker died in debt.
  4. D. Explorers preferred maps with mountains and rivers.

Answer: A. The mapmaker's refusal to invent what he did not know cost him in his lifetime but made his map the one later explorers trusted.

Honest blanks, unpopular then, trusted later.

Why the other answers are wrong

B. Eighteenth-century maps were full of invented features.
True of his rivals, not the point.
C. The mapmaker died in debt.
A consequence, not the idea.
D. Explorers preferred maps with mountains and rivers.
They carried the blank one.

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