High School Reading Grades 11 12 Quiz
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PASSAGE
Consider the propagation of a rumor through a densely networked community. In the first phase, an initial claim circulates among a small cluster of individuals who share both social ties and prior beliefs favorable to the claim; here, transmission is nearly frictionless. In the second phase, the rumor reaches the boundary of this cluster and encounters individuals with weaker ties and more skeptical dispositions. Counterintuitively, resistance at this boundary does not slow the rumor's spread—it accelerates it, because each act of contestation generates additional exposure. In the third phase, the rumor achieves what sociologists call 'ambient familiarity': even those who reject it can recite it, and the mere fact of widespread recognition begins to function, for many, as evidence of legitimacy. By the fourth phase, correction becomes structurally impossible, since any refutation must invoke the rumor itself, thereby reinforcing the very familiarity that sustains it.
The passage's four-phase structure primarily serves to demonstrate that
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