Two Texts, One Claim: Which Statement Is Best Supported?
Mr. Alvarez's class is comparing two short texts about a city plan to plant 500 trees along Third Street. Text A, by the city forester, states: "Three summers of readings on comparable blocks show that street trees can lower summer surface temperatures by as much as 6 degrees, and they slow stormwater runoff." Text B, a letter to the editor from shop owner Dana Ruiz, states: "I support trees, but the plan puts saplings four feet from my awning, and my delivery trucks need that curb. The city's schedule shows planting in April with no maintenance budget after year one." Priya must answer the item "Which statement is best supported by both texts?" She has narrowed the choices to (A) "Street trees lower summer temperatures" and (B) "The tree plan has unresolved practical problems." She notices that (A) appears only in Text A, while (B) can be reached only by combining the forester's claims with Ruiz's concerns.
1. Which choice, (A) or (B), is best supported by both texts, and why does the other choice fail the item's wording?
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(B) is correct. The item asks what both texts support, so the winning answer must be reachable from the pair, not from one passage alone.
- (A) is a claim made only by the forester. Text B neither confirms nor disputes the temperature figure, so Text B contributes no support to (A). A statement that lives in one text cannot be "supported by both."
- (B) is built from the combination: Text A establishes that the plan has real benefits (cooling, stormwater), and Text B supplies specific unresolved obstacles (four-foot setback versus truck access, April planting, no maintenance funding past year one).
Note the trap: (A) may be true, but "best supported" is a question about evidence location, not about which fact sounds most scientific.
2. Explain how Ruiz builds her argument in Text B, and why her concession in the first clause matters to a reader deciding whether to take her seriously.
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Ruiz uses a concession-then-objection structure: "I support trees, but..." The concession signals she is not opposed to the project in principle, which makes her appear fair-minded rather than obstructive.
She then shifts from opinion to checkable specifics: a measurable distance (four feet), a dated schedule (April planting), and a budget fact (no maintenance after year one). Citing "the city's own schedule" is especially effective because it uses the planners' documents against the plan's practicality, so a reader can verify the objection rather than simply trust her.
Her first-person stake ("my awning," "my delivery trucks") narrows the argument to one business, which is both a strength (concrete) and a limit (possibly not typical of other shop owners). A strong answer names both.
3. If Priya had to decide which text to trust for the 6-degree temperature figure, what should she check, and why is "Text A is biased" not by itself a sufficient reason to reject the number?
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She should check method transparency first: Text A names a duration (three summers) and a comparison group (comparable blocks), which are the ingredients of a checkable measurement. Her next move is to look for the underlying readings and whether anyone disputes them.
A source's bias is a reason to verify, not a reason to discard automatically. The forester has an interest in the plan passing, but an interested source can still report an accurate measurement, and Text B - a critic - does not challenge the figure. Because the critic is silent on the temperature claim, the number stands uncontested within this pair of texts.
A weak answer stops at "the forester wants trees, so the number is unreliable." A strong answer separates who is speaking from how the claim could be checked.