ORIGINAL SOURCE

History can be imagined as a pyramid. At its base are the millions of primary sources—the plantation records, city directories, speeches, songs, photographs, newspaper articles, diaries, and letters that document times past. Based on these primary materials, historians write secondary works—books and articles on subjects ranging from deafness on Martha’s Vineyard to Grant’s tactics at Vicksburg. Historians produce hundreds of these works every year, many of them splendid. In theory, a few historians, working individually or in teams, then synthesize the secondary literature into tertiary works—textbooks covering all phases of U.S. history.

From page 4 of the book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen (New Press, 1995).

According to Loewen, history textbooks are written by a few historians working individually or in teams.

Loewen states that the material in U.S. history textbooks is supposedly distilled from a broad range of secondary works—documents written by historians who have studied primary documents from various historical periods.

The second answer is correct because it accurately summarizes the main point of the passage using the writer’s own words. The first choice is off the point, and it borrows language from the original source without citing it—a form of plagiarism.