SAT Reading & Writing · Cross-Text Connections
**Text 1** A literary scholar argues that a poet's frequent use of nautical imagery, ships, storms, harbors, throughout her work reflects…
**Text 1**
A literary scholar argues that a poet's frequent use of nautical imagery, ships, storms, harbors, throughout her work reflects a lifelong preoccupation with themes of departure and uncertain return, tracing this imagery back to the early loss of a sibling who died at sea.
**Text 2**
A different scholar studying the same poet's notebooks finds that most of the nautical imagery was added during a later revision process, years after the poems were first drafted, suggesting the imagery may reflect the poet's mature artistic choices more than an early personal trauma.
Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?
A literary scholar argues that a poet's frequent use of nautical imagery, ships, storms, harbors, throughout her work reflects a lifelong preoccupation with themes of departure and uncertain return, tracing this imagery back to the early loss of a sibling who died at sea.
**Text 2**
A different scholar studying the same poet's notebooks finds that most of the nautical imagery was added during a later revision process, years after the poems were first drafted, suggesting the imagery may reflect the poet's mature artistic choices more than an early personal trauma.
Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?
Answer and explanation
Answer: D: The two texts offer different explanations for the same observed pattern, one biographical and one focused on the poet's later revision process.
Both texts agree on the observable pattern, frequent nautical imagery, but offer different accounts of its origin, one rooted in early biography, the other in later compositional choices. D captures this shared observation with competing explanations. A overstates Text 2, which addresses the timing of the imagery's addition, not the reality of the sibling's death. C misreads two clearly connected analyses of the same poet. B ignores the real tension between the two explanations Text 2 introduces.
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