1. For each PSAT Writing & Language passage, you will find 5 accompanying questions. Your task is to read the passage and choose the answer option for each question that best enhances the writing’s quality or ensures the passage adheres to the standard rules of English.
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Passage: In recent decades, public debates over contested social and environmental policies have grown increasingly polarized. Where compromise once prevailed, polarized factions now vilify opposing perspectives as threats to core values. However, examination finds valid yet incomplete aims on both sides resulting more from philosophical differences than factual disputes.
Regarding energy development for example, advocates prioritize affordable access enabling industry competitive in global markets and average workers’ mobility. They emphasize fossil resources’ current dominance amid transition to alternatives incapable of meeting demands at scale. Critics counter unmitigated extraction and emissions risk planetary stability vital to continued prosperity given climate science warnings. Both perspectives implicate legitimate yet partial perspectives on complex problems with solutions requiring diligent analysis over absolutist accusations.
Similarly in healthcare, ensuring affordability and provider choice motivate resistance to sweeping systemic overhauls. However, those highlighting gaps leaving many vulnerable and questioning infinite prioritization of profitability over wellness also raise principled concerns. All societies strive for secure, dignified lives empowering pursuit of happiness yet diverge on precise roles and limits of collective support mechanisms. Reasonable people of good intention disagree on optimal balancing within resource constraints.
By acknowledging each side potentially raises valid yet incomplete perspectives, discussions can become productive problem-solving rather than zero-sum battles promoting paralyzing gridlock. Communities prosper when allowing open yet nuanced exchange elevating understanding over rigidity, facilitating practical solutions improving more lives with scarce resources allocated according to a diversity of priorities and values comprising any pluralistic landscape. Compromise fostering consensus serves the public better than absolutism breeding resentment and reaction, particularly regarding long-term, complex challenges with impacts stretching beyond any single perspective.
Questions:
- According to the passage, what has changed regarding public debates in recent decades?
