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Answer: We believe the sentence is effectively completed this way:

“The snobbish playwright is almost Malthusian in his belief that higher ticket prices will limit the size of the audience in the small theater at the same time it winnows the riffraff.”

Those three words enhance the sentence in several ways. First, snobs believe people beneath their perceived position in society are “riffraff.” By keeping prices high, the poorer members of society are kept from entering a theater simply because they cannot afford the ticket. Second, one of the core ideas of the 19th century English economist the Rev. Thomas Malthus was that the population is naturally kept down by the earth’s limit to feed it. So the use of “winnows” not only conveys the idea of getting rid of undesirables, it does so in agrarian language: Winnowing can refer to the process of separating wheat and chaff.
填上這三個字，在各方面都讓句子的意思更加完整。首先，勢利的人認為社會地位比他們低的人都是「死老百姓」。提高劇院的票價，貧窮的人負擔不起，就不能進戲院看戲。其次，十九世紀英國經濟學家馬爾薩斯 (Thomas Malthus) 主張，人口數量自然會因為地球供給糧食有限而受到限制；“Winnows”（篩選）是指分離小麥的穗實與穀糠，除了表示排拒不受歡迎的人，也呼應了隱含的農業意義。