Question

In which situation is a thesaurus most likely to be helpful?
A. Writing a descriptive essay
B. Reading a historical
C. Analyzing a modern poem
D. Compiling facts from an article

Answer 1

@satellite73

Answer 2

@Adrianna.Gongora

Answer 3

I think A ._.

Answer 4

I think that it is C. If you need to compare something that was written with "bigger" words, you would look it up in the thesaurus so that you could connect to that part of the poem.

Answer 5

Start with what a thesaurus is.
http://beta.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/thesaurus
It's a book in which words with similar meanings are grouped together. (It's a place you can look up synonyms.)

Where would you need to look up words with similar meanings?

B. Reading a historical (something)
Probably not here. If you didn't know the meaning of a word, you'd just go to the dictionary.

D. Compiling facts from an article
Here you're just looking up information. You haven't started writing whatever you're compiling the facts for, so you don't need a thesaurus.

C. Analyzing a modern poem
Arguably, this could be correct. Some poetry uses unusual words and you could benefit from comparing them to other similar words you know. However, I see two problems.
1. You could look up the unknown words in a dictionary
2. The answer specifically mentions a *modern* poem. If it's modern, we might assume you'll already be familiar with the words and not need to look up similar ones.
If there isn't a better answer, I'd go with this one, but...

A. Writing a descriptive essay
This one has a stronger reason for using a thesaurus. You're writing a *descriptive* essay. You're describing things. To do that, you need good, rich, descriptive words -- and that's where you turn to a thesaurus. You look up a word that's not quite descriptive enough (say, "red") and you get more specific descriptions like "sanguine" or "rosy".