Diagnostic Test 16 Practice Test

A linguist argues that the rapid spread of a borrowed term on social media signals users' preference for brevity over nuance. The claim ties the term's adoption to character limits and fast-scrolling habits: shorter words, the linguist asserts, win attention and therefore become dominant. This framework treats the platform environment as the key driver of lexical change, minimizing the role of algorithmic nudges or stylistic imitation. However, some researchers caution that platform tools—autocomplete, predictive text, and suggested hashtags—can seed and amplify certain forms regardless of user intent. To assess whether brevity itself motivates usage, one must distinguish deliberate choice from automated or imitated selection. If the term's spread is primarily the product of mechanical insertion rather than user preference, the linguist's interpretation would be undermined.

Which finding, if true, would most directly weaken the scholar's claim?

Adapted from What I Think and Feel at Twenty-Five (1922) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

As a man grows older it stands to reason that his vulnerability increases. Three years ago, for instance, I could be hurt in only one way—through myself. If my best friend’s wife had her hair torn off by an electric washing-machine, I was grieved, of course. I would make my friend a long speech full of “old mans,” and finish up with a paragraph from Washington’s Farewell Address; but when I’d finished I could go to a good restaurant and enjoy my dinner as usual. In fact I was pretty much invulnerable. I put up a conventional wail whenever a ship was sunk or a train got wrecked; but I don’t suppose, if the whole city of Chicago had been wiped out, I’d have lost a night’s sleep over it—unless something led me to believe that St. Paul was the next city on the list. Even then I could have moved my luggage over to Minneapolis and rested pretty comfortably all night.

But that was three years ago when I was still a young man. I was only twenty-two. Now, I’m vulnerable. I’m vulnerable in every way. I used to have about ten square feet of skin vulnerable to chills and fevers. Now I have about twenty. I have not personally enlarged, the twenty feet includes the skin of my family, but I might as well have, because if a chill or fever strikes any bit of that twenty feet of skin I begin to shiver. And so I ooze gently into middle-age; for the true middle-age is not the acquirement of years, but the acquirement of a family. The incomes of the childless have wonderful elasticity. Two people require a room and a bath; a couple with child requires the millionaire’s suite on the sunny side of the hotel. And yet I think that marriage is the most satisfactory institution we have. I’m simply stating my belief that when Life has used us for its purposes it takes away all our attractive qualities and gives us, instead, ponderous but shallow convictions of our own wisdom and “experience.” The older I grow the more I get so I don’t know anything. If I had been asked to do this article about five years ago it might have been worth reading.

The reference to the whole city of Chicago being wiped out is meant to highlight which aspect of the author’s character as a young man?