@bgurevic262 I think it's because PCB poisoning is explicitly framed as "further exacerbating" the condition (of emaciation?). Thus, the main contributing causal factor is brevetoxin rather than PCB since it is logically prior (the brevetoxin must have lead to the metabolizing, and the effects of PCB followed as a result of that).

@oliviaking.109 Just because fish tissue accumulated toxin doesn't mean they weren't affected, and the absence of that discussion does not exclude it from the realm of possibility. It is entirely possible that the fish were also emaciated / affected in some way. Since this question asks which one is "most strongly supported", E is a lot stronger than A.

#help Absolutely terrible question. Even if it is a "most strongly supported" question, AC B does not do anywhere near enough of a good job to even consider it as a choice. If the people ate Plants A through D, that says NOTHING about if people elsewhere ate A + B, B + C, C + D, etc. There is nothing about AC B that would even remotely suggest other people are not also using / eating the same plants, ONLY that there is no singular group out there that ate a similarly wide variety of wild plants.

AC C seems to make the most logical, smallest leap. If we assume that a "more advanced stage in the use of wild plants than any other people at the time" is related to the idea of eating a wider variety of wild plants than any other people at the time (which works temporally speaking), then it logically follows that the plants found were uncultivated. That I feel is a MUCH smaller jump to make.

@7SageTutor I'm not quite sure I understand fully. I feel as though that pattern of reasoning you presented isn't quite analogous to the stimulus of the question though. Something closer might be "Some people claim I'm mean. But the amount of nice things I do is equal or greater to people who are similar to me. So these people are wrong." If the only premise I provide is that I do nice things ≥ other people, shouldn't we assume that I believe that is the sole indicator of my meanness? Shouldn't we just work with the information we get? I feel that stating that the author doesn't bother to specify other indicators removes the stimulus from the vacuum that it exists in.

Another point: If we did choose AC C and the comparable series did possess popular appeal, there is no comparative element to be applied in the argument without assuming that sales of memorabilia is an indicator of popular appeal. So correcting the "flaw" proposed by AC C still does not result in a sound argument. Very confused.

#help Why is AC B not the correct choice here? Honestly, my main reasoning is that AC D just seems too weak for me. It seems completely plausible that the most overconfident business managers could be LEAGUES less overconfident than the entrepreneurs. In fact, the stimulus indicates as much: "in general the entrepreneurs were much more so than the business managers". To this point, it might follow that the most overconfident business managers aren't really all that overconfident at all. They could be to a minuscule amount and still be considered to be the most overconfident, which doesn't lend much support to the conclusion at all.

Secondly, I saw mentions of the "in spite of the enormous odds" part of the prompt being referred to a red herring, but I don't see how that nuance doesn't directly correlate with AC B. It logically follows (and strengthens the conclusion) that if entrepreneurs (a generally more overconfident segment of the population) did in fact understand the odds stacked against them and yet still went after the goal of starting a business, overconfidence in general would do the same.

Does this part of the stimulus not justify AC E: "With such intensive training, chess players who may not have superior innate capacities can acquire skills that circumvent basic limits on such factors as memory and the ability to process information." If superiority of innate capacities does not necessarily matter with chess, then it logically follows that "the importance of motivation and interest in the development of superior performance [aka the drivers behind intensive training] shows that in some fields the production of exceptional skill does not depend in any way on innate talents of individuals."

@KevinLin Thank you for replying! That's a great point. I think I made the assumption that because drugs successfully treated those with aggravated back injuries, they must have been necessary, thus connecting back to the second claim that drugs are a necessary part of the treatment as noted in the stimulus. I still feel as though AC D is a more applied version of AC B, but I also kind of realized that AC B is the underlying principle and probably the better answer as a result.

#help I'm left unconvinced by any explanations of why AC D is incorrect. I ended up choosing AC B during the test and BR simply because it seemed to be the most straightforward of the two, but I feel as though I cannot substantiate a reason to eliminate AC D. If "Some back muscle injuries that have been aggravated by improper attempts at physical therapy, such as home massage, have been successfully treated with drugs", then those that need drugs (aka those that have been aggravated by improper attempts at PT) are those that receive drugs. I know that this idea of "some back muscle injuries" might cut down the subset being referred to, but the conclusion of the stimulus is simply that drugs are necessary for all those who receive them, and AC D would fit into that category. Those who receive them are the ones who have been aggravated by PT and thus need them. Maybe the only ones in this population of patients who need drugs are the ones that got messed up by PT. Doesn't seem like much of a stretch to me.

In fact, isn't AC D just a more applied version of the general principle outlined in AC B? Wouldn't that make it a better answer? Very confused.

Q1 is just plain wrong in the written explanation. Even if "It" could be defined to be a referential phrase, it is not at all referring to "keeping deep wounds free of bacteria". It is, in a sense, a "dummy" pronoun used to fill the gap of needing a subject for the sentence. It doesn't refer to anything, but rather is just a placeholder. Using JY's logic expressed in past explanations, replacing "It" with "keeping deep wounds free of bacteria" would yield this sentence: "Keeping deep wounds free of bacteria is difficult to keep deep wounds free of bacteria", which makes no sense. Also, "that" is another referential phrase that is not identified within Q1.

@brownga0294 But claims are not premises? Couldn't claims could also be conclusions? Thus, if the argument is made up of one premise and one conclusion, that does not exclude the possibility of it still being two claims. #help