Question

Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as “Even though Tom was ______, Mary thought he was _____.” And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, “Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous.” Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like that. What can be inferred from the excerpt?Tan believes that achievement tests should include a wider variety of fill-in-the-blank questions.
Tan believes that achievement tests should be constructed by published authors of fiction.
Tan believes that achievement tests give inadequate measurements of language ability.
Tan believes that achievement tests give inflated measurements of language ability.

Answer 1

In this excerpt the narrator is complaining about the way achievement test are and how up to that they measure someone’s knowledge. He uses the word bland to describe the right answer of this kind of tests which it means „lacking a strong or particular flavor; not interesting”, in this context can be used describing it as non-sense or not obvious answers. He also complains about how bad he is in this because he cannot find the logic in the answers. With this explained, we can infer that the right answer is D Tan believes that achievement tests give inflated measurements of language ability, because he kind of argues that the answers are not "valid" to measure it.

Answer 2

Answer:

It can be inferred from the text that Tan believes that achievement tests give inadequate measurements of language ability.

Explanation:

In this excerpt Tan gives an example of her experience with achievement tests and even says how her mother's teaching in life has made her think or see things differently from the one needed for that kind of exams, she uses this information to support the idea that they are not always accurate measures of language ability.