UPCAT Reading Comprehension practice question 21: The main claim of the passage is that
Correct answer
C. both kinds of evidence are shaped by the purposes behind them, so each should be judged by what it was made to record
The closing sentences state that both bear the marks of the interests that produced them and that the useful question is what each was made for.
What an Archive Cannot Hold
Historians of the region face a particular difficulty. The written record was produced almost entirely by administrators, and administrators wrote about what they needed to count: tribute owed, households registered, disputes brought before a court. A village appears in the archive on the day it becomes a fiscal problem and vanishes again once the matter is settled.
This does not make the documents useless. It makes them documents about administration, which is a narrower subject than the past.
Oral tradition covers different ground. It preserves genealogy, the boundaries of ancestral land, the reasons a settlement moved, and the obligations owed between families. It is also, as its critics correctly observe, revised in transmission: each generation adjusts emphasis to suit present concerns.
But written sources are revised too. A tribute assessment reflects what an official chose to record, sometimes what a community persuaded him to record, and often what could be defended if audited. Both kinds of evidence bear the marks of the interests that produced them. The useful question is not which source is honest, but what each was made for, and therefore what it can be expected to know.
The question
The main claim of the passage is that
- Option A: oral tradition is a more reliable source than written administrative records
- Option B: administrative documents should be discarded in favor of genealogy
- Option C: both kinds of evidence are shaped by the purposes behind them, so each should be judged by what it was made to recordCorrect
- Option D: the history of the region cannot be reconstructed with any confidence
Why C is correct
The closing sentences state that both bear the marks of the interests that produced them and that the useful question is what each was made for.
Why the other options are wrong
- A oral tradition is a more reliable source than written administrative records
- The passage explicitly refuses this ranking, arguing instead that both bear the marks of the interests behind them.
- B administrative documents should be discarded in favor of genealogy
- The passage says the opposite: the documents are not useless, they are simply about a narrower subject.
- D the history of the region cannot be reconstructed with any confidence
- Far more pessimistic than the passage, which offers a constructive test for using each source.