# Humanities passage vocabulary

Words for argument, interpretation, and scholarly disagreement.

3 question(s), with answers and distractor explanations.

### Early accounts treated the migration as a single event; more recent scholarship offers a ____ picture of several overlapping movements.

*core · humanities*

0. nuanced  **← answer**
1. cursory
2. derivative
3. polemical

**Why it fits:** The contrast is between one simple event and several overlapping ones, so the newer picture is more finely distinguished.

**Why the others fail:**
- *cursory* — "Cursory" means hasty and shallow, which would make the newer account simpler, not more detailed.
- *derivative* — "Derivative" means copied from earlier work — the sentence presents the new scholarship as an advance.
- *polemical* — "Polemical" means aggressively argumentative, which the sentence gives no evidence for.

### The newly dated sediment layers ____ the accepted timeline, pushing the settlement back by two centuries.

*core · humanities*

0. undermine  **← answer**
1. reinforce
2. reiterate
3. delineate

**Why it fits:** Moving the date by two centuries contradicts the accepted timeline, weakening the case for it.

**Why the others fail:**
- *reinforce* — "Reinforce" would mean the new dates supported the old timeline, but they change it substantially.
- *reiterate* — "Reiterate" means to repeat, which new contradicting evidence does not do.
- *delineate* — "Delineate" means to describe precisely. The layers do more than describe — they overturn.

### Her ____ question exposed the assumption the whole argument had been resting on.

*core · humanities*

0. incisive  **← answer**
1. rambling
2. tentative
3. rhetorical

**Why it fits:** A question that cuts straight to a hidden assumption is sharp and penetrating.

**Why the others fail:**
- *rambling* — "Rambling" means unfocused, which could not expose a precise assumption.
- *tentative* — "Tentative" means hesitant, at odds with decisively exposing something.
- *rhetorical* — "Rhetorical" means asked for effect without expecting an answer — but this question did real work.

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