SAT Inferences Question

Describing adverbs as “silly,” novelist Chuck Palahniuk is one of several authors and literary critics who have recommended minimizing the use of adverbs, especially those ending in -ly (e.g., “graciously”), in works of fiction. To investigate the prevalence of -ly adverbs in novels, author and statistician Ben Blatt used natural language processing — machine learning technology that reads and interprets text — to calculate the rates at which these words occur in the novels of William Faulkner, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. Blatt concluded that in Faulkner’s oeuvre, there is a negative correlation between -ly adverb proliferation and perceived literary merit. Which finding, if true, would most directly illustrate the pattern Blatt identified?