MASSACHUSETTS TESTS FOR EDUCATOR LICENSURE (MTEL)
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Information, Interactive Practice Exercises, and Practice Tests 1
Objective: Determine the writer’s purpose. The correct answer is (b). Choice (c) is clearly wrong, as there is little evidence of advocacy in the passage, and thriftiness is tangential to the information presented. Choice (d) is plausible, but too general: the passage says nothing about religious practices in seventeenth-century Salem, for example. Choices (a) and (b) are difficult to choose between (such a dilemma between two choices is common in these questions). Both (a) and (b) accurately describe the main thrust of the passage, and either one in the absence of the other one could be correct. However, choice (b) more closely limits the scope of the passage to the seventeenth century, and thus is closer to the actual passage than is choice (a). Thus, (b) is the best choice.