📚 Practice Mode

Which of the following is the best revision of the underlined portion of sentence no. (4) below?
If he is addicted to the fine arts or to pure science instead of to trade and finance, let him be poor.

Directions for the question:
The following passage is an early draft of an essay. Some parts of the passage need to be rewritten. Read the passage and select the best answer for the question that follows. Keep in mind that some questions are about particular sentences or parts of sentences and ask you to improve sentence structure or word choice. Other questions ask to consider organization and development. In choosing the answer, follow the requirements of standard written English.

(1) The thoughtless wickedness with which we scatter sentences of imprisonment, torture in the solitary cell and on the plank bed, privation of human intercourse and daily news, and flogging, on moral invalids and energetic rebels, is as nothing compared to the silly levity with which we tolerate poverty as if it were either a wholesome tonic for lazy people or else a virtue to be embraced as St. Francis embraced it. (2) If a man is indolent let him be poor. (3) If he is drunken, let him be poor. (4) If he is addicted to the fine arts or to pure science instead of to trade and finance, let him be poor. (5) If he does not conform, let him be poor.(6) Now what does this ‘let him be poor’ means? It means let him be weak. (7) Let him be ignorant. (8) Let him be cheap, and drag his fellows down to his own price by selling himself to do their work. (9) Let his habitations turn our cities into poisonous congeries of slums. (10) This being so, is it really wise to let him be poor? (11) Would he not do ten times less harm as a prosperous burglar, incendiary or murderer, to the utmost limits of humanity’s comparatively negligible impulses in these directions? (12) Suppose we were to decide that poverty is the one thing we will not tolerate – that every adult with less than a few thousands a year shall be inexorably brought within the ambit, and every hungry, half-naked child forcibly fed and clothed, would that be an enormous drag on our existing system?