How One Author Would Respond to the Other

Each passage is a small map: a claim or theory in one, a method and result in the other. The question asks you to draw a single edge between them, how would author two react to author one's idea. To do that, read Text 1 for its claim, then read Text 2 for its actual finding, stripped of any framing language. Ask one question: does this finding support the claim, undercut it, or support it only under certain conditions? That answer is the verdict, and it's usually one of a few flavors: flat agreement, flat rejection, 'largely correct but' (agrees with a condition attached), 'plausible yet unsupported' (the idea isn't refuted, just never tested), or 'true only sometimes' (holds in some cases, not others). Picking the right flavor matters as much as picking the right direction.

Watch the difference between a conditional verdict and a full agreement or full rejection. If Text 2 finds an effect only when some extra factor is present, like dispatch spread across multiple stations, the second author isn't fully endorsing or fully denying Text 1's claim. They're narrowing it. Mixing this up with plain agreement is the most common way to lose these questions.

This topic sits right next to word-in-context and structure questions because all three ask you to track how meaning shifts, within a sentence, within one passage, or across two passages. Mastering the single-edge habit here, reading one text, then asking what the other text does to it, makes every paired-passage question faster and more reliable.