|Question 12Verbal

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Describing adverbs as “silly,” novelist Chuck Palahniuk is one of several authors and literary critics who have recommended minimizing the use of adverbs, especially those ending in -ly (e.g., “graciously”), 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 William Faulkner, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. Blatt concluded that in Faulkner’s oeuvre, there is a negative correlation between -ly adverb proliferation and perceived literary merit.
Which finding, if true, would most directly illustrate the pattern Blatt identified?
Whereas Faulkner’s acclaimed novel The Sound and the Fury has one of the lowest -ly adverb rates among Faulkner’s works, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby has the lowest -ly adverb rate among Fitzgerald’s novels.
A
In The Sound and the Fury, which is widely recognized as a literary masterpiece, Faulkner used 42 -ly adverbs per 10,000 words, whereas in his less-acclaimed novel Soldiers’ Pay, Faulkner used 148 -ly adverbs per 10,000 words.
B
In his celebrated novel Light in August, Faulkner used 67 -ly adverbs per 10,000 words, whereas 67% of celebrated authors’ novels that have fewer than 50 -ly adverbs per 10,000 words have been classified as great by critics.
C
Whereas Faulkner used on average 92 -ly adverbs per 10,000 words in the 19 novels of Faulkner’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.
D