ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by a coconut palm. The best friend of people

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stranded on desert islands everywhere.

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Check out the following passage...

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The writer is considering omitting the underlined sentence:

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The coconut we buy in the store does not resemble the coconut you find growing on a coconut palm.

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If the writer were to delete it, the essay would primarily lose which of the following?

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And here are the potential answers:

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To answer this question correctly, we have to take a good, hard look at this sentence...

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...and figure out exactly what it's trying to tell us.

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Choice (A) is easy to eliminate. Nowhere in the passage does the writer speculate on "why

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we buy coconuts in the store."

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Personally, we like to buy coconuts when we're preparing to make a nice Thai curry. But that's

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neither here nor there.

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How about (B)? Could it be the right answer?

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If so, then our author must be some kind of caped crusader on a quest to save the endangered

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coconut from all the Thai curry lovers out there.

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This, however, is not the case. The author's only agenda seems to be giving us a scientific

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rundown of the...non-endangered...coconut.

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Let's take a look at choice (D).

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This one's a little trickier to eliminate. The underlined sentence does tell us that

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the coconuts we get in the store don't look like the ones growing from coconut palms.

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However, the sentence doesn't tell us what the coconut actually looks like in either

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state. So...we can take choice (D) out of the running.

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The correct answer is (C). The information about the coconuts we buy in the store is

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an elaboration on the information about the tree-growing coconuts presented in Paragraph 1.

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A rumor from Disney Studios: the next Pixar film will detail the incredible journey of

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a brave little coconut from its tree to the store.

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A nutty idea perhaps, but at least it will make millions...

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