Lev is organizing a workshop for the City Arts Council on finding affordable housing for student artists. Lev considers his audience—the students—to be laypersons. What makes this audience fall under the category of laypersons? A. They don’t have the proper qualifications to attend a workshop about affordable housing. B. They don’t have much prior knowledge about affordable housing in the city. C. They don’t have the necessary reasoning skills to find affordable housing on their own. D. They don’t have an understanding of affordability in the context of housing.

B. They don’t have much prior knowledge about affordable housing in the city.

Explanation:

When we are tailoring a speech or a text to a particular audience, we need to think about how much previous knowledge of the topic this audience has. This is necessary in order to make sure that the text is both relevant and interesting to the audience. It also ensures that the audience is able to understand the information presented. In this example, the audience is made up of "laypersons," which are people who are not experts in the subject, and are not expected to know much about it.