Digital SAT Reading and Writing Practice Question #752

Text 1 Many historians attribute the spectacular Bronze Age Collapse of the 12th century BCE to the inherent systemic fragility of the era's Mediterranean economies. Because the major empires of the time—such as the Mycenaeans, Hittites, and Egyptians—were tightly bound by highly intertwined trade networks, they operated much like a modern globalized economy. Consequently, scholars argue that a localized disruption, such as a major earthquake or a sudden disruption in the tin supply, would have caused a catastrophic cascading failure across the entire geopolitical landscape. Text 2 Historian Eric Cline pushes back on the prevalent "cascading failure" narrative, arguing that it over-relies on circumstantial evidence of economic interconnection while underestimating external variables. Cline asserts that the exogenous shocks of the 12th century BCE—specifically, a series of unprecedented megadroughts combined with violent, mass migrations of the "Sea Peoples"—were so geographically vast and intensely severe that they would have decimated even highly resilient, entirely decentralized economic systems. Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to the characterization of the Bronze Age economies presented in Text 1?