Question

Question 31 (Multiple Choice Worth 3 points)
(MC)
Read the following excerpt from Robert Louis Stevenson's Essay in the Art of Writing and answer the question:
There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations
lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be
appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys. In a similar way, psychology itself, when
pushed to any nicety, discovers an abhorrent baldness, but rather from the fault of our analysis than from any poverty native to the
mind. And perhaps in aesthetics the reason is the same: those disclosures which seem fatal to the dignity of art seem so perhaps
only in the proportion of our ignorance; and those conscious and unconscious artifices which it seems unworthy of the serious artist
to employ were yet, if we had the power to trace them to their springs, indications of a delicacy of the sense finer than we conceive,
and hints of ancient harmonies in nature. [...] I must therefore warn that well-known character, the general reader, that I am here
embarked upon a most distasteful business: taking down the picture from the wall and looking on the back; and, like the inquiring
child, pulling the musical cart to pieces.
What message is the author trying to convey with the word in bold?
When we look very closely at something, it can become beautiful.
When we back away from something, it can become ugly.
When we back away from something, it can become beautiful.
O When we look too closely at something, it can become ugly.

Answer 1

The message which the author is trying to convey with the word in bold (abhorrent) is that: D. When we look too closely at something, it can become ugly.

What is an inference?

An inference can be defined as a process through which a reader can deduce the meaning or message (information) that is associated with a subject matter (word) in a literary work, especially through induction or deductive reasoning.

What is deductive reasoning?

Deductive reasoning can be defined as a type of logical reasoning that typically involves drawing conclusions based on a given set of rules and conditions, or from one or more premises (factual statements) that are assumed to be generally (universally) true.

Based on the excerpt above, we can reasonably infer and logically deduce that the message which the author is trying to convey with the word in bold (abhorrent) is that when you look too closely at something, it becomes ugly as cited or referenced by this statement "Remember he is observing the art closely, and coarseness refers to it being ugly."

Read more on deductive reasoning here: brainly.com/question/860494

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