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Difficulty: MediumAnalogous Relationships

During the Middle Ages, the Hanseatic League established exclusive trading posts, known as Kontore, in foreign ports such as London. Within these secure enclaves, the league provided its member merchants with collective defense, legal representation, and shared warehouse facilities, enabling them to dominate local commerce. In return, the merchants paid membership duties that funded the league's administrative operations and defensive warships. However, this highly organized, mutually beneficial partnership was ultimately contingent on the host monarch granting the league special tax charters and exemptions. When the English crown revoked these privileges due to domestic political pressure, the merchants lost their commercial advantages and the London Kontor collapsed, showing that the partnership's success depended entirely on an external authority's ongoing permission rather than the league's internal cohesion.

Based on the passage, the relationship between the Hanseatic League and its member merchants is most analogous to which of the following scenarios?

  1. A
    A merchant fleet pays a foreign government directly for access to its ports, but terminates the contract when a rival fleet offers a more cost-effective trading agreement.
  2. B
    A university department and a student union partner to run a campus bookstore, but the project is abandoned when internal arguments over budget allocations split the partnership.
  3. A software developer and a mobile platform operator share development tools and app revenues, but their business model collapses when a regulatory commission bans the platform's payment system.Answer
  4. D
    A medieval merchant guild coordinates with city administrators to build municipal warehouses, ensuring that local traders can store their imported goods securely.

Answer

The relationship is most analogous to a software developer and a mobile platform operator sharing tools and revenues whose business model collapses when a regulatory commission bans the platform's payment system.
The correct answer describes a scenario where two cooperative parties (a developer and a platform operator) maintain a mutually beneficial arrangement that is completely dependent on an external authority (a regulatory commission). When the external regulator bans a critical operational component, the partnership collapses. This matches the logical structure in the passage, where the league's internal stability was neutralized by the host monarch's revocation of trading privileges.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the passage to identify the core components of the relationship and the cause of its failure.
The Hanseatic League and its merchants have a mutually beneficial relationship (providing security and facilities in exchange for funding) that relies on a critical privilege granted by an external authority (the host monarch's tax charters). The partnership collapses when this external authority revokes that privilege, despite the internal cohesion of the partners.
Abstracting the relationship dynamics helps separate the core structure from the historical details of the text.
2
Evaluate the options to find a scenario that mirrors this external dependency and subsequent collapse.
The scenario involving a developer and a platform operator sharing tools and revenues matches the mutual support structure. The regulatory commission acting as the external authority whose ban causes the collapse mirrors the host monarch revoking tax charters.
This establishes a structural parallel where internal success is negated by the withdrawal of external permission.
3
Verify that the incorrect options either misrepresent details or rely on superficial domain similarity.
One scenario fails due to internal arguments (violating the 'internal cohesion' detail), another is a voluntary business decision rather than an forced collapse, and the last merely copies the medieval merchant theme without illustrating the vulnerability.
Eliminating distractors ensures that the correct answer is selected based on structural logic rather than common reading traps.

Key Concept

Mapping abstract logical structures to identify analogous relationships across different subject domains.
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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Topics

Analogous Relationships

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