Scope Errors: Too Narrow or Too Broad

Every notes-based question on this part of the test gives you a goal sentence: describe a career, a decade, one performance, one experiment. Then it gives you several answer choices built from true facts in the notes. The trap is that most choices are factually fine. What sinks them is scope: the goal names a size, and the sentence has to match that size exactly. If the goal says "across his career," the subject of your sentence has to be the whole career, not one painting from it, however well-documented that painting is in the notes.

To check scope, read the goal first and name its boundary in your head: one year, one work, one decade, one person's whole output. Then look at the subject and verb of each choice. Does the sentence's claim actually span that boundary, or does it only span a piece sitting inside it? A sentence about Harbour Light, however accurate, describes one canvas; it cannot stand in for a claim about Bergh's whole career unless its wording reaches back to the early work and forward to the late work, the way the correct choice does.

Students often assume broad is the safe default, since a broad sentence seems to "cover more." It doesn't: a goal asking about one 1998 experiment is not served by a sentence summarizing a decade of them, because that sentence answers a different, bigger question than the one asked. This is the same judgment call as the connector questions right before it in this block — both ask you to match a specific, stated target rather than pick whatever sounds most informative or most impressive.