Rhetorical Synthesis Lv Hard (Part2)

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• A commodity chain is the series of links connecting the production and purchase of a commodity on the world market.
• Chinese American anthropologist Anna Tsing studies the contemporary commodity chain of matsutake mushrooms.
• At one end of the matsutake chain are mushroom pickers in Oregon.
• At the other end are wealthy consumers who buy the costly matsutake in Japan.
• According to Tsing, “Japanese traders began importing matsutake in the 1980s, when the scarcity of matsutake in Japan first became clear.”

The student wants to provide an overview of the matsutake commodity chain. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• Archaeologist Jon Erlandson and colleagues argue that humans first arrived in the Americas by sea.
• They propose that humans traveled between Pacific Ocean islands and coastlines from northeast Asia to the Americas.
• Many of these islands and coastal zones were later submerged as glaciers melted and sea levels rose.
• The researchers think that “a coastal route, including kelp forests and estuaries, would have provided a rich mix of marine, estuarine, riverine, and terrestrial resources” such as seaweeds, fish, and birds.
• This proposed scenario is known as the kelp highway hypothesis.

The student wants to summarize the kelp highway hypothesis. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• The popular wood-wide web theory posits that trees can communicate and exchange resources with one another via common mycorrhizal networks (CMNs) of fungi.
• Ecologist Dr. Suzanne Simard first suggested this theory in 1997.
• She described trees as “super-cooperators.”
• In the 2022 study “The Decay of the Wood-Wide Web?,” mycologist Dr. Justine Karst and colleagues evaluated dozens of CMN studies.
• They write that CMNs “have captured the interest of broad audiences. We are concerned, however, that recent claims about CMNs in forests are disconnected from evidence.”

The student wants to use a quotation to emphasize a potential problem with the wood-wide web theory. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• The Gullah are a group of African Americans who have lived in parts of the southeastern United States since the 18th century.
• Gullah culture is influenced by West African and Central African traditions.
• Louise Miller Cohen is a Gullah historian, storyteller, and preservationist.
• She founded the Gullah Museum of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, in 2003.
• Vermelle Rodrigues is a Gullah historian, artist, and preservationist.
• She founded the Gullah Museum of Georgetown, South Carolina, in 2003.

The student wants to emphasize the duration and purpose of Cohen’s and Rodrigues’s work. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• A thermal inversion is a phenomenon where a layer of atmosphere is warmer than the layer beneath it.
• In 2022, a team of researchers studied the presence of thermal inversions in twenty-five gas giants.
• Gas giants are planets largely composed of helium and hydrogen.
• The team found that gas giants featuring a thermal inversion were also likely to contain heat-absorbing metals.
• One explanation for this relationship is that these metals may reside in a planet’s upper atmosphere, where their absorbed heat causes an increase in temperature.

The student wants to present the study’s findings to an audience already familiar with thermal inversions. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal? 

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• Ulaanbaatar is the capital of Mongolia.
• The city’s population is 907,802.
• Ulaanbaatar contains 31.98 percent of Mongolia’s population.
• Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam.
• The city’s population is 7,781,631.
• Hanoi contains 8.14 percent of Vietnam’s population.

The student wants to emphasize the relative sizes of the two capitals’ populations. Which choice most effectively uses information from the given sentences to emphasize the relative sizes of the two capitals’ populations?

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• The magnificent frigatebird (fregata magnificens) is a species of seabird that feeds mainly on fish, tuna, squid, and other small sea animals.
• It is unusual among seabirds in that it doesn’t dive into the water for prey.
• One way it acquires food is by using its hook-tipped bill to snatch prey from the surface of the water.
• Another way it acquires food is by taking it from weaker birds by force.
• This behavior is known as kleptoparasitism.

The student wants to emphasize a similarity between the two ways a magnificent frigatebird acquires food. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• In 1971, experimental musician Pauline Oliveros created Sonic Meditations.
• Sonic Meditations is not music but rather a series of sound-based exercises called meditations.
• Each meditation consists of instructions for participants to make, imagine, listen to, or remember sounds.
• The instructions for Meditation V state, “walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”
• Those for Meditation XVIII state, “listen to a sound until you no longer recognize it.”

The student wants to provide an explanation and an example of Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• British musicians John Lennon and Paul McCartney shared writing credit for numerous Beatles songs.
• Many Lennon-McCartney songs were actually written by either Lennon or McCartney, not by both.
• The exact authorship of specific parts of many Beatles songs, such as the verse for “In My Life,” is disputed.
• Mark Glickman, Jason Brown, and Ryan Song used statistical methods to analyze the musical content of Beatles songs.
• They concluded that there is 18.9% probability that McCartney wrote the verse for “In My Life,” stating that the verse is “consistent with Lennon’s songwriting style.”

The student wants to make a generalization about the kind of study conducted by Glickman, Brown, and Song. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• Freddie Wong (born 1985) is a director and special effects artist from the United States.
• He is best known for the action-comedy web series Video Game High School (VGHS).
• VGHS premiered in 2012 on RocketJump, a YouTube channel that Wong cocreated.
• The series was celebrated for its inventive video game–centric world and high-quality special effects.
• VGHS was nominated for a Producers Guild Award for Outstanding Digital Series.

The student wants to begin a narrative about Wong’s award-nominated web series. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• Some powerful works of literature have so influenced readers that new legislation has been passed as a result.
• The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) is the autobiography of a man who endured slavery on both sides of the Atlantic.
• Equiano’s book contributed to the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807.
• The Jungle (1906) is a fictional work by Upton Sinclair that describes unsanitary conditions in US meatpacking plants.
• Sinclair’s book contributed to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

The student wants to emphasize a difference between the two books. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• One of history’s greatest libraries was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, Iraq.
• It was founded in the eighth century with the goal of preserving all the world’s knowledge.
• Scholars at the House of Wisdom collected ancient and contemporary texts from Greece, India, and elsewhere and translated them into Arabic.
• Writings included those of the Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Indian mathematician Aryabhata.
• The House of Wisdom used Chinese papermaking technology to create paper versions to be studied and shared.

The student wants to explain how the House of Wisdom preserved the world’s knowledge. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• The Million Song Dataset (MSD) includes main audio features and descriptive tags for popular songs.
• Audio features include acoustic traits such as loudness and pitch intervals.
• Many algorithms use these audio features to predict a new song’s popularity.
• These algorithms may fail to accurately identify main audio features of a song with varying acoustic traits.
• Algorithms based on descriptive tags that describe fixed traits such as genre are more reliable predictors of song popularity.

The student wants to explain a disadvantage of relying on audio features to predict a song’s popularity. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?