Question+21

21. The author offers specific data to support which of the following assertions?

This question serves to make the reader identify the author's assertions, and be able to decide which of these is actually supported by specific facts. It requires the reader to understand what an assertion is and to know what is actually considered data. To do so, the reader must look at the assertions in the answer choices, and surrounding sentences related to these assertions. The reader must then find specific data that supports one of the assertions.

A. This is a distractor answer choice, as although it references a significant cause and effect, it does not supply the reader with any actual data of correlation.

B. This is a distractor answer choice, as it alludes to certain data showing "school bond failures are way up", but no specific data is supplied to tell the reader by how much these failures have increased in frequency.

C. This is an distractor answer choice, as it references international comparisons, but does not mention the specific data involved with these.

D. This is an incorrect answer choice, as it simply states the issue as a fact, and does not reference any form of data in any way.

E. This is the correct answer choice, as the following sentence refers to specific data with the statistic of "1 percent" to support the sentence's assertion