Christina B. answered • 03/20/19
Experienced, Positive, and Effective Tutor with an M.Ed.
When taking standardized tests, the important thing is to pick the best answer. Test writers will often give you will several answers that seem correct because they are related to the topic.
I copied the passage below and bolded the text that was most important to the author's message.
____________________________________________
Furthermore, very often today words and images of various sorts are juxtaposed and integrated in a variety of ways. In newspaper and magazines as well as in textbooks, images take up more and more of the space alongside words. In fact, in many modern high school and college textbooks in the sciences images not only take up more space, they now carry meanings that are independent of the words in the text. If you can't read these images, you will not be able to recover their meanings from the words in the text as was more usual in the past. In such multimodal texts (texts that mix words and images), the images often communicate different things from the words. An example from a science textbook of the phenomenon the author describes in the third paragraph could be
As we look at the bolded information, it becomes more clear that this passage is about information in images that conveys meaning that is different from the meaning in the text.
As you look at the answer choices, can you eliminate any?
A) A genetic tree that coincides with the discussion of specific mammal classes in the text
B) A diagram of a specific chemical reaction that is used to explain a broad definition in the text
C) An illustration of a plant cycle that accompanies a chapter on photosynthesis
D) A cartoon that references the same methods discussed in the text about laboratory safety
D) A cartoon that references the same methods discussed in the text about laboratory safety
I eliminated this answer straight away because of the bolded words. If the image and the text convey the same message, then they do not support the author's point in this passage.
A) A genetic tree that coincides with the discussion of specific mammal classes in the text
This answer can be eliminated because mammal classes and their genetic links are related to each other. This image would not be independent in meaning from the text.
B) A diagram of a specific chemical reaction that is used to explain a broad definition in the text
Here, the image and the text are related. The question becomes whether one would be able to "recover the meaning [of the image] from the words in the text."
C) An illustration of a plant cycle that accompanies a chapter on photosynthesis
This answer is a bit open for interpretation about whether the referenced "plant cycle" is one having to do with photosynthesis, like plant respiration, or whether it is unrelated, like the plant life cycle.
So now you need to choose the best answer between B and C. In which case do you think you would need to be able to view the illustration to understand the content in the text?
B is probably the best answer.
