|Question 14Verbal

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Describing adverbs "as damaging to a writer," novelist Graham Greene is one of several authors and literary critics who have recommended minimizing the use of adverbs, especially those ending in -ly (e.g., "obediently"), in works of fiction. To investigate the prevalence of -ly adverbs in novels, author and statistician Ben Blatt used natural language processing-machine learning technology that reads and interprets text-to calculate the rates at which these words occur in the novels of Ernest Hemingway, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Blatt concluded that in Hemingway's oeuvre, there is a negative correlation between -ly adverb proliferation and perceived literary merit.
Which finding, if true, would most directly support Blatt's conclusion?
Whereas Hemingway's acclaimed novel The Sun Also Rises has one of the lowest -ly adverb rates among Hemingway's works, F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby has the highest adverb rate among Fitzgerald's novels.
A
Missing from text.
B
Whereas Hemingway used on average 80 -ly adverbs per 10,000 words in the 10 novels of Hemingway's that Blatt investigated, Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, used on average 76 -ly adverbs per 10,000 words in her novels.
C
In The Sun Also Rises, which is widely recognized as a literary masterpiece, Hemingway used 63 -ly adverbs per 10,000 words, whereas in his less-acclaimed novel True at First Light, Hemingway used 102 -ly adverbs per 10,000 words.
D
Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, which received widespread praise, contains approximately the same rate of -ly adverbs as several of Hemingway's less-discussed short stories.
B