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Passage (William James, *The Will to Believe*, 1896, Section I): "Let us give the name of *hypothesis* to anything that may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either *live* or *dead*. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature — it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an *option*. Options may be of several kinds. They may be — 1, *living* or *dead*; 2, *forced* or *avoidable*; 3, *momentous* or *trivial*; and for our purposes we may call an option a *genuine* option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind. " What is the relationship between the two paragraphs of the passage?

AThe second paragraph offers a counterexample that complicates the first paragraph's definition.
BThe second paragraph applies the concept of liveness to a different domain, namely religious experience.
CThe first paragraph introduces and defines the term *hypothesis*; the second introduces a second, related technical term (*option*) and subdivides it.
DThe second paragraph restates the first in less technical language for general readers.
Answer & Solution
Correct answer: C. The first paragraph introduces and defines the term *hypothesis*; the second introduces a second, related technical term (*option*) and subdivides it.
Each paragraph performs a definition-and-classification move on a distinct technical term: - ¶1 names *hypothesis* and divides it (with the electrical metaphor) into *live* vs *dead*. - ¶2 names *option* (the decision between two hypotheses) and classifies it along three axes: living/dead, forced/avoidable, momentous/trivial. The paragraph ends by combining the three axes to yield the *genuine option*. The paragraphs share a single structural pattern (introduce term → divide it) applied to two related concepts. James is building a vocabulary, layer by layer, that the rest of the essay will deploy. - **A** is wrong because the second paragraph does not complicate but *extends* the framework. - **B** misnames the second paragraph's domain — it is still about *options*, not yet about religious experience. - **D** misses the new technical content; the second paragraph introduces *option*, which was not in ¶1.
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