Practice Passages — Evidence, and Restoration

Two passages that are harder than the first pair, and harder in the way CAT is actually harder: not through vocabulary but through a turn. Each of these concedes something substantial to the view it is arguing against — one spends a whole paragraph making the case for clinical judgement, the other grants that every restoration is a statement of its own era's taste — and then declines to end up where the concession points. Half the questions below test whether you can tell a concession from a change of side, which is the single most productive difficulty in the section: a candidate who reads paragraph two of either passage and stops has the author's position exactly backwards. Read to the end before answering anything. Six to seven minutes per passage including its questions.

Reading a Turn

  • "And yet", "but", "even so" are the load-bearing words. Everything before them is what the author is prepared to grant; everything after is where they stand. In both passages here, that word arrives at the start of a paragraph rather than inside a sentence, which makes the structure easy to see and easy to miss if you are skimming for content words.
  • A concession made at length is still a concession. The second paragraph of the first passage is the strongest statement of the case against the author's own conclusion, and it is there because an argument that has not stated its opponent fairly has not been made. Length is not agreement.
  • Watch for a conclusion that refuses both sides. Neither passage ends by picking a winner: one says the two methods answer different questions, the other that there is no neutral option. An option that hands victory to one side will feel decisive and be wrong.

Key takeaways

  • Find the turn — "and yet", "but", "even so". What precedes it is granted; what follows it is the author's position.
  • A paragraph-long concession is still a concession. Stating the opponent at full strength is what an argument does, not a change of side.
  • When a passage ends by refusing both positions, every option that declares a winner is wrong however satisfying it reads.
  • A trial reports a population average and no patient is a population — a distinction the first passage grants and then puts in its place rather than abandoning.
  • Doing nothing is a choice with consequences. Both passages turn on that idea, and it is a favourite of the section.

Practice questions (8)

Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.

  1. Passage 1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    For most of the history of medicine, the physician's own judgement was the evidence. A treatment was thought to work because experienced doctors had seen it work, and the accumulated impressions of a profession were taken to be a form of knowledge. The trial that replaced this — patients allocated to treatments at random, and neither they nor their doctors told which — was resisted for a long time, and the objection was not simply conservatism. It was that randomisation deliberately discards exactly the information a good clinician relies on: this patient is frail, that one is young, this one has responded before.

    The objection has real force, and it is worth stating at its strongest. A clinician's judgement is not superstition; it is pattern recognition built from thousands of cases, and in an individual consultation it is often the only guide available. What the trial establishes is a population average, and no patient is a population. A drug that helps six people in ten can be the wrong drug for the person in front of you, and the trial cannot tell you whether they are one of the six.

    And yet the case for the trial does not rest on judgement being worthless. It rests on a narrower and stranger fact: that experience is systematically misleading about a particular class of question. A clinician sees the patients who return and not those who do not; remembers the recovery that followed a treatment and not the recovery that would have followed anyway; and cannot, by construction, observe the patient they did not treat. Every one of these is invisible from inside the consulting room, and no amount of additional experience corrects any of them — more cases produce a more confident version of the same distortion.

    So the two are not rivals for the same job. The trial answers a question no individual can answer from experience, however long that experience is; the clinician answers a question the trial cannot reach, about one person on one afternoon. The mistake in either direction is the same mistake — treating a method as though it settled everything — and it is committed as often by those who cite a trial to end a conversation as by those who dismiss one because it does not describe their patient.

    What is the author's final position on clinical judgement and the randomised trial?

    1. The trial has replaced judgement, which is now of historical interest only
    2. They answer different questions, and treating either as settling everything is the same error
    3. Clinical judgement is more reliable than trials for individual patients, so trials matter less
    4. Both methods are unreliable and medicine needs a third approach
    Show answer

    Answer: B — They answer different questions, and treating either as settling everything is the same error

    The final paragraph says it in as many words: "the two are not rivals for the same job", and the mistake "in either direction is the same mistake". Option C is the position of the second paragraph, which the author states at full strength as a concession — a reader who stops there answers C. Option A ignores that concession entirely. Option D invents a claim: nothing in the passage calls either method unreliable, only limited in what it can reach.

  2. Passage 1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    For most of the history of medicine, the physician's own judgement was the evidence. A treatment was thought to work because experienced doctors had seen it work, and the accumulated impressions of a profession were taken to be a form of knowledge. The trial that replaced this — patients allocated to treatments at random, and neither they nor their doctors told which — was resisted for a long time, and the objection was not simply conservatism. It was that randomisation deliberately discards exactly the information a good clinician relies on: this patient is frail, that one is young, this one has responded before.

    The objection has real force, and it is worth stating at its strongest. A clinician's judgement is not superstition; it is pattern recognition built from thousands of cases, and in an individual consultation it is often the only guide available. What the trial establishes is a population average, and no patient is a population. A drug that helps six people in ten can be the wrong drug for the person in front of you, and the trial cannot tell you whether they are one of the six.

    And yet the case for the trial does not rest on judgement being worthless. It rests on a narrower and stranger fact: that experience is systematically misleading about a particular class of question. A clinician sees the patients who return and not those who do not; remembers the recovery that followed a treatment and not the recovery that would have followed anyway; and cannot, by construction, observe the patient they did not treat. Every one of these is invisible from inside the consulting room, and no amount of additional experience corrects any of them — more cases produce a more confident version of the same distortion.

    So the two are not rivals for the same job. The trial answers a question no individual can answer from experience, however long that experience is; the clinician answers a question the trial cannot reach, about one person on one afternoon. The mistake in either direction is the same mistake — treating a method as though it settled everything — and it is committed as often by those who cite a trial to end a conversation as by those who dismiss one because it does not describe their patient.

    The second paragraph exists in order to:

    1. State the case against the author's conclusion at its strongest before answering it
    2. Show that clinicians are usually right and trials usually wrong
    3. Introduce a new topic that the rest of the passage develops
    4. Explain why randomisation was invented
    Show answer

    Answer: A — State the case against the author's conclusion at its strongest before answering it

    It opens "the objection has real force, and it is worth stating at its strongest" — that sentence names the paragraph's function outright, and the third paragraph begins "and yet", which is the answer to it. Option B reads the concession as the conclusion. Option C fails because the paragraph is not a new topic but the opposing side of the topic already introduced, and the passage does not develop it — it answers it.

  3. Passage 1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    For most of the history of medicine, the physician's own judgement was the evidence. A treatment was thought to work because experienced doctors had seen it work, and the accumulated impressions of a profession were taken to be a form of knowledge. The trial that replaced this — patients allocated to treatments at random, and neither they nor their doctors told which — was resisted for a long time, and the objection was not simply conservatism. It was that randomisation deliberately discards exactly the information a good clinician relies on: this patient is frail, that one is young, this one has responded before.

    The objection has real force, and it is worth stating at its strongest. A clinician's judgement is not superstition; it is pattern recognition built from thousands of cases, and in an individual consultation it is often the only guide available. What the trial establishes is a population average, and no patient is a population. A drug that helps six people in ten can be the wrong drug for the person in front of you, and the trial cannot tell you whether they are one of the six.

    And yet the case for the trial does not rest on judgement being worthless. It rests on a narrower and stranger fact: that experience is systematically misleading about a particular class of question. A clinician sees the patients who return and not those who do not; remembers the recovery that followed a treatment and not the recovery that would have followed anyway; and cannot, by construction, observe the patient they did not treat. Every one of these is invisible from inside the consulting room, and no amount of additional experience corrects any of them — more cases produce a more confident version of the same distortion.

    So the two are not rivals for the same job. The trial answers a question no individual can answer from experience, however long that experience is; the clinician answers a question the trial cannot reach, about one person on one afternoon. The mistake in either direction is the same mistake — treating a method as though it settled everything — and it is committed as often by those who cite a trial to end a conversation as by those who dismiss one because it does not describe their patient.

    The passage says that more experience produces "a more confident version of the same distortion". This is because:

    1. Clinicians become less willing to learn as their careers advance
    2. The distorting cases are invisible from within the consulting room, so extra cases add data of the same biased kind
    3. Doctors tend to remember their failures more vividly than their successes
    4. Medical knowledge changes faster than any individual can follow
    Show answer

    Answer: B — The distorting cases are invisible from within the consulting room, so extra cases add data of the same biased kind

    The paragraph lists three things a clinician structurally cannot see — the patients who do not return, the recovery that would have happened anyway, the patient not treated — and says "every one of these is invisible from inside the consulting room". Since the blind spot is built into the vantage point rather than caused by inattention, more looking from the same place cannot correct it. Option C reverses the stated bias, and option A imports a claim about attitude that the passage never makes: the argument is about the structure of the evidence, not the character of doctors.

  4. Passage 1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    For most of the history of medicine, the physician's own judgement was the evidence. A treatment was thought to work because experienced doctors had seen it work, and the accumulated impressions of a profession were taken to be a form of knowledge. The trial that replaced this — patients allocated to treatments at random, and neither they nor their doctors told which — was resisted for a long time, and the objection was not simply conservatism. It was that randomisation deliberately discards exactly the information a good clinician relies on: this patient is frail, that one is young, this one has responded before.

    The objection has real force, and it is worth stating at its strongest. A clinician's judgement is not superstition; it is pattern recognition built from thousands of cases, and in an individual consultation it is often the only guide available. What the trial establishes is a population average, and no patient is a population. A drug that helps six people in ten can be the wrong drug for the person in front of you, and the trial cannot tell you whether they are one of the six.

    And yet the case for the trial does not rest on judgement being worthless. It rests on a narrower and stranger fact: that experience is systematically misleading about a particular class of question. A clinician sees the patients who return and not those who do not; remembers the recovery that followed a treatment and not the recovery that would have followed anyway; and cannot, by construction, observe the patient they did not treat. Every one of these is invisible from inside the consulting room, and no amount of additional experience corrects any of them — more cases produce a more confident version of the same distortion.

    So the two are not rivals for the same job. The trial answers a question no individual can answer from experience, however long that experience is; the clinician answers a question the trial cannot reach, about one person on one afternoon. The mistake in either direction is the same mistake — treating a method as though it settled everything — and it is committed as often by those who cite a trial to end a conversation as by those who dismiss one because it does not describe their patient.

    Which of these is presented as an objection to randomisation rather than as the author's own view?

    1. That randomisation discards the individual information a clinician relies on
    2. That experience is systematically misleading about a class of question
    3. That a clinician cannot observe the patient they did not treat
    4. That citing a trial to end a conversation is a mistake
    Show answer

    Answer: A — That randomisation discards the individual information a clinician relies on

    The first paragraph attributes this to those who resisted the trial: "the objection ... was that randomisation deliberately discards exactly the information a good clinician relies on". The author takes it seriously in paragraph two and then answers it. Options B, C and D are all the author's own claims, from the third and fourth paragraphs. Sorting attributed views from asserted ones is a distinct skill from following an argument, and a passage that states its opponent fairly is exactly where the distinction is hard.

  5. Passage 2. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    Restorers of paintings work under a rule that sounds like modesty and is in fact a claim about knowledge: any intervention should be reversible. Fill a loss with a pigment that can be dissolved off, not one that bonds; re-line a canvas with an adhesive that a later hand can undo. The rule is not about humility before the artist. It is about the restorer's own successors, and the near-certainty that they will disagree with the present generation about what the object should look like.

    That disagreement has a documented history. Nineteenth-century restorers admired the golden warmth of aged varnish and preserved it, on the reasonable view that it was part of what the painting had become. Their twentieth-century successors identified the same varnish as a yellowed screen concealing the artist's colour, and removed it — sometimes taking a glaze with it. Each generation was confident, each had reasons, and each was undoing the confident work of the last. A restoration is therefore always two things at once: a treatment of an object and a statement of the taste of its moment.

    It would be comfortable to conclude that restorers should therefore do as little as possible, and much of the profession says so. But the counsel of minimal intervention conceals a decision rather than avoiding one. Doing nothing is not neutral: canvases sag, varnish darkens, pigment lifts, and a painting left alone continues to change in a direction nobody chose. To decline to intervene is to prefer the object's condition in fifty years to its condition now, which is a judgement about value exactly as much as cleaning it would be. There is no position outside the argument from which the object can simply be left as it is, because there is no "as it is" — only a trajectory, and a choice about where along it to hold the thing.

    The reversibility rule is described as "a claim about knowledge" because it:

    1. Assumes that later restorers will know more about pigments
    2. Accepts in advance that the present generation's view of how the object should look will be disputed
    3. Shows humility before the original artist's intentions
    4. Requires restorers to document everything they do
    Show answer

    Answer: B — Accepts in advance that the present generation's view of how the object should look will be disputed

    The first paragraph rejects the humility reading explicitly — "the rule is not about humility before the artist" — and puts the successors in its place: the rule exists because of "the near-certainty that they will disagree with the present generation about what the object should look like". So what the rule encodes is a claim about the limits of present knowledge, which is why option C is not merely incomplete but the reading the paragraph names and dismisses. Option A narrows it to pigment chemistry; the disagreement described is about taste.

  6. Passage 2. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    Restorers of paintings work under a rule that sounds like modesty and is in fact a claim about knowledge: any intervention should be reversible. Fill a loss with a pigment that can be dissolved off, not one that bonds; re-line a canvas with an adhesive that a later hand can undo. The rule is not about humility before the artist. It is about the restorer's own successors, and the near-certainty that they will disagree with the present generation about what the object should look like.

    That disagreement has a documented history. Nineteenth-century restorers admired the golden warmth of aged varnish and preserved it, on the reasonable view that it was part of what the painting had become. Their twentieth-century successors identified the same varnish as a yellowed screen concealing the artist's colour, and removed it — sometimes taking a glaze with it. Each generation was confident, each had reasons, and each was undoing the confident work of the last. A restoration is therefore always two things at once: a treatment of an object and a statement of the taste of its moment.

    It would be comfortable to conclude that restorers should therefore do as little as possible, and much of the profession says so. But the counsel of minimal intervention conceals a decision rather than avoiding one. Doing nothing is not neutral: canvases sag, varnish darkens, pigment lifts, and a painting left alone continues to change in a direction nobody chose. To decline to intervene is to prefer the object's condition in fifty years to its condition now, which is a judgement about value exactly as much as cleaning it would be. There is no position outside the argument from which the object can simply be left as it is, because there is no "as it is" — only a trajectory, and a choice about where along it to hold the thing.

    The nineteenth- and twentieth-century treatments of varnish are contrasted in order to show that:

    1. Twentieth-century restorers were better trained
    2. Confident, reasoned restoration decisions are repeatedly undone by the next generation
    3. Aged varnish should always be preserved
    4. Restoration techniques have improved steadily over time
    Show answer

    Answer: B — Confident, reasoned restoration decisions are repeatedly undone by the next generation

    The paragraph ends on the point: "each generation was confident, each had reasons, and each was undoing the confident work of the last." Options A and D both read the sequence as progress, which is precisely what the example is arranged to deny — the twentieth-century restorers were not correcting an error but expressing a different taste, and they sometimes removed a glaze in the process. Option C picks a side in an argument the passage refuses to settle.

  7. Passage 2. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    Restorers of paintings work under a rule that sounds like modesty and is in fact a claim about knowledge: any intervention should be reversible. Fill a loss with a pigment that can be dissolved off, not one that bonds; re-line a canvas with an adhesive that a later hand can undo. The rule is not about humility before the artist. It is about the restorer's own successors, and the near-certainty that they will disagree with the present generation about what the object should look like.

    That disagreement has a documented history. Nineteenth-century restorers admired the golden warmth of aged varnish and preserved it, on the reasonable view that it was part of what the painting had become. Their twentieth-century successors identified the same varnish as a yellowed screen concealing the artist's colour, and removed it — sometimes taking a glaze with it. Each generation was confident, each had reasons, and each was undoing the confident work of the last. A restoration is therefore always two things at once: a treatment of an object and a statement of the taste of its moment.

    It would be comfortable to conclude that restorers should therefore do as little as possible, and much of the profession says so. But the counsel of minimal intervention conceals a decision rather than avoiding one. Doing nothing is not neutral: canvases sag, varnish darkens, pigment lifts, and a painting left alone continues to change in a direction nobody chose. To decline to intervene is to prefer the object's condition in fifty years to its condition now, which is a judgement about value exactly as much as cleaning it would be. There is no position outside the argument from which the object can simply be left as it is, because there is no "as it is" — only a trajectory, and a choice about where along it to hold the thing.

    The author objects to the counsel of minimal intervention on the ground that:

    1. It is too expensive for most museums to follow
    2. Leaving an object alone is itself a choice about which of its future states to prefer
    3. Restorers who do little are usually the least skilled
    4. Paintings do not in fact deteriorate as much as is claimed
    Show answer

    Answer: B — Leaving an object alone is itself a choice about which of its future states to prefer

    The argument is that "doing nothing is not neutral": a painting left alone keeps changing, so declining to intervene prefers its condition in fifty years to its condition now — "a judgement about value exactly as much as cleaning it would be". Option D contradicts the passage, which lists sagging, darkening and lifting as what happens when nothing is done. Options A and C introduce considerations — cost, skill — that the passage never raises, and an option that adds a new consideration is wrong even when the consideration is real.

  8. Passage 2. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    Restorers of paintings work under a rule that sounds like modesty and is in fact a claim about knowledge: any intervention should be reversible. Fill a loss with a pigment that can be dissolved off, not one that bonds; re-line a canvas with an adhesive that a later hand can undo. The rule is not about humility before the artist. It is about the restorer's own successors, and the near-certainty that they will disagree with the present generation about what the object should look like.

    That disagreement has a documented history. Nineteenth-century restorers admired the golden warmth of aged varnish and preserved it, on the reasonable view that it was part of what the painting had become. Their twentieth-century successors identified the same varnish as a yellowed screen concealing the artist's colour, and removed it — sometimes taking a glaze with it. Each generation was confident, each had reasons, and each was undoing the confident work of the last. A restoration is therefore always two things at once: a treatment of an object and a statement of the taste of its moment.

    It would be comfortable to conclude that restorers should therefore do as little as possible, and much of the profession says so. But the counsel of minimal intervention conceals a decision rather than avoiding one. Doing nothing is not neutral: canvases sag, varnish darkens, pigment lifts, and a painting left alone continues to change in a direction nobody chose. To decline to intervene is to prefer the object's condition in fifty years to its condition now, which is a judgement about value exactly as much as cleaning it would be. There is no position outside the argument from which the object can simply be left as it is, because there is no "as it is" — only a trajectory, and a choice about where along it to hold the thing.

    The claim that there is "no 'as it is'" for a painting means that:

    1. The original appearance of a painting can never be known
    2. A painting is always in the middle of changing, so any state is a point chosen on a trajectory
    3. Every restoration destroys some part of the original
    4. Museums should display paintings in whatever state they arrive in
    Show answer

    Answer: B — A painting is always in the middle of changing, so any state is a point chosen on a trajectory

    The sentence itself supplies the gloss: "only a trajectory, and a choice about where along it to hold the thing." The point is temporal — a painting has no fixed state to be left in, because it is always in transit. Option A is a claim about knowledge of the original, which is a different and more sweeping assertion the passage does not make; option C is true of some restorations and is not what this phrase is about; option D is a recommendation the argument specifically rules out, since arrival is itself just a point on the trajectory.