Directions: In this section, you have two short passages. After each passage, you will find some items based on the passage. Read the passage carefully and answer the items based on it. You are required to select your answers based on the contents of the passage and the opinion of the author only.
Passage - II
Historical analysis combines several levels of thinking and study, posing a question about the past, setting up the problem in a form intended to facilitate its solution, solving the problem, and verifying the solution or interpretation. Academic history relies on formal analysis, based on rational and systematic apprehension of relevant evidence. Yet such formal analysis can be seen as a subset of the broader category of interpretation, including responses to evidence that are impressionistic and informal rather than formal and logically structured. Indeed, the many genres of academic and popular history run the full gamut from logically systematic to impressionistic. Historians come from a widely varying range of philosophical traditions, and the varying philosophies lead to quite different ways of posing questions and answers. The distinctions among philosophical principles sketched here help to show how it is that different analytical priorities arise on the main topics proposed for analysis; they also show how historians can rely on similar data yet come to different conflicting conclusions. Nineteenth century philosophical outlooks remain central to the world-historical analysis: most notably the dialectics of G.W.F. Hegel and the materialism of Karl Marx. Another great nineteenth-century current of thought was positivism, elaborated by Auguste Comte and focusing on study through breaking large problems into small ones, seeking deterministic relationship within the smaller problems. Philosophies of structuralism and post modernism have developed in more recent times, rejecting the positivist separation of problems into discrete sub-problems and emphasizing interaction among aspects of a problem.
'The many genres of academic and popular history run the full gamut from logically systematic to impressionistic' means:
- AThe range of texts varies from those based on objective analysis and those based on subjective assertions.
- BHistorical analysis that is rarely vague to that which establishes evidence.
- CHistorical analysis that is always vague to that which establishes no evidence.
- DHistorical analysis analysis that is rarely systematic to that which establishes evidence.
Explanation
To run the full gamut from logically systematic to impressionistic means to span the whole range between the two extremes. Option A restates this as the range of texts varying from objective analysis to subjective assertion. The other options garble the sentence with vague or self-contradictory phrasing. Hence A is correct.