Question

Read the following passage and answer the question below.

The greens' success has clear policy implications, especially on issues of nuclear power, ecological tax reform, and citizenship rights. But success also has implications for parties themselves. Greens have always faced a unique 'strategic conundrum' arising from their unique beliefs and movement roots. Put simply, how can they reconcile their radical alternative politics with participation in mainstream or 'grey' parliamentary and government structures? Throughout the 1990s most parties shed their radical cloth in an attempt to capture votes, even at the expense of party unity and purity. Most were rewarded with electoral success well beyond what had been imaginable in the 1980s. The price to pay has been tortured internal debates about strategy, and new questions about green party identity and purpose. Today the key questions facing green parties revolve around not whether to embrace power, but what to do with it. More specifically, green parties face three new challenges in the new millennium: first, how to carve out a policy niche as established parties and governments become wiser to green demands, and as green concerns themselves appear more mainstream. Second, how to make green ideas spread beyond the confines of rich industrialised states into Eastern Europe and the developing world, where green parties remain marginal and environmental problems acute. Third, how to ensure that the broader role of green parties, as consciousness raisers, agitators, conscience of parliament and politics, is not sacrificed on the altar of electoral success. Green parties have come a long way since their emergence and development in the 1970s and 1980s. They have become established players able to shape party competition, government formation, and government policy. But this very 'establishment' carries risk for a party whose core values and identities depend mightily on their ability to challenge the conventional order, to agitate and to annoy. For most green parties, the greatest fear is not electoral decline so much as the prospect of becoming a party with parliamentary platform, ministerial voice, but nothing to say.

Question: Which of the following is the most important point that the author highlights?

• A. Challenges before green parties to change their strategy from green activism to green governance.
• B. How should green parties win confidence and support of governments?
• C. Transformation of green parties in recent decades.
• D. Green movement is not strong in developing countries.

Hint:

Find the sentence that the whole passage is building toward, not just one supporting detail from it.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is A

The passage opens by noting that green success has real policy implications, then spends most of its length on the strategic conundrum this success creates for the parties themselves: having gained power, they must now decide what to do with it. The line that states this most directly is that the key questions facing green parties revolve around not whether to embrace power, but what to do with it. Everything after that, the three challenges and the risk of becoming an establishment party, is elaboration on this same central shift from an outside protest movement to a governing player.

1. Challenges before green parties to change their strategy from green activism to green governance: this restates the passage's central claim in different words. Greens have gone from protesting outside government to holding power inside it, and must now work out how to govern rather than just agitate.
2. How should green parties win confidence and support of governments: the passage never frames the issue as winning over other governments; green parties are themselves part of governments in places, so this misreads their position.
3. Transformation of green parties in recent decades: this is true as background, the passage does describe their growth since the 1970s and 1980s, but it is a supporting fact, not the main point the author is building toward.
4. Green movement is not strong in developing countries: this is only the second of the three challenges, a small part of the passage, not its central argument.

The author's real focus is the shift in what green parties must do now that they hold power, so the strategy shift from activism to governance is the most important point.