Question

8 it is an impressive accomplishment. and yet, apart from the restrained, intelligent, beautifully constructed opening pages and a few stray passages thereafter - a melancholy twilight walk in manhattan, some billowing curtains settling into place at the closing of a drawing - room door - gatsby as a literary creation leaves me cold. like one of those manicured european parks patrolled on all sides by officious gendarmes, it is pleasant to look at, but you will not find any people inside.
9 indeed. the great gatsby is less involved with human emotion than any book of comparable fame i can think of. none of its characters are likable. none of them are even dislikable, though nearly all of them are despicable. they function here only as types, walking through the pages of the book like kids in a school play who wear sashes telling the audience what they represent: old money, the american dream, organized crime. it is possible, of course, to deny your readers access to the inner lives of your characters and still write a psychologically potent book: i give you blood meridian. but to do that, you yourself must understand your characters and conceive of them as human.
10 fitzgerald fails at that, most egregiously where it most matters: in the relationship between daisy and gatsby. this he constructs out of one part nostalgia, four parts narrative experience, and zero parts anything else - love, sex, desire, any kind of palpable connection. fitzgerald himself (who otherwise expressed, to anyone who would listen, a dazzled reverence for his own novel) acknowledged this flaw. of the great, redemptive romance on which the entire story is supposed to turn, he admitted, i gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between gatsby and daisy.

1. what does the word potent mean, as it is used in paragraph 9?

confusing
horrific
powerful
strong
clear all

Explanation:

En el contexto del texto, se está hablando de que un libro puede ser psicológicamente "potent" (en este caso, Blood Meridian) aunque no se den acceso a las vidas internas de los personajes. La palabra "potent" en inglés se refiere a algo que tiene gran fuerza o eficacia. Entre las opciones, "powerful" (poderoso) es el sinónimo más adecuado. "Confusing" significa confuso, "horrific" significa horripilante y "strong" se refiere más a fuerza física o resistencia, mientras que "powerful" se adapta mejor al contexto de algo que tiene un gran impacto psicológico.

Answer:

powerful