WTF is that question stem lol

If anything, the final portion of A where it talks about elements "already present in the dance" definitely kills it as a valid AC choice in my mind because of the transformative nature of "refining" something.

You could potentially argue that "refining" the dance could also just be further emphasizing the inherent grace of the cakewalk that's already there, but this seems like a weak argument when I can just as easily say that Walker had to reinterpret the contemporary cakewalk at the time to assuage middle class African American concerns and that a sufficient emphasis on grace is an aspect that was actually not present in the dance.

"The stim simply doesn’t talk about different interpretations being choreographed, so C is factually unsupported."

I feel like it actually does.

The clincher for me is in the final paragraph where it talks about how Walker worked to win over middle class African Americans "by refining the cakewalk and emphasizing its fundamental grace." The act of refining something, as well as distillation with regard to Walker's efforts to win over European-Americans, I feel, has a pretty clear transformative notion behind it. In the context of a dance, like the cakewalk, a transformative process is, by definition, choreographing.

I'm a bit lost with regard to how the stimulus is able to support AC A in Q17. The final sentence of the second paragraph specifically seems to guard against picking A as an answer choice as it talks about how the negative effect of the ice ages on speciation in temperate regions is less than previously theorized and how arctic conditions (which understood to include rates of speciation) were actually unaffected by such ice ages.

A seems to be based on the implication that:

Ice age = negative pressure on speciation,

But that is immediately contrasted in the paragraph referencing the time theory.

#feedback

What messed me up with this question was that I feel like E was pretty much a big nothing-burger in terms of what it added/took away from the argument. So what if stimulation is also beneficial as well to a child's development?

It feels like, for E to actually weaken the argument any appreciable amount, you have to inject an external value judgement into the stimulus with regard to the relative value of the intellectual development of stimulation vs the value you get from the development afforded to the child by extra sleep. And, AFAIK, answers that require you to inject some sort of outside assumption/value judgement have traditionally been pretty answers.

#help

Okay, so just to check my understanding here.

If we take the statement: "All dogs go to heaven. Victor is a dog; therefore, Victor will go to heaven." Assuming we look at this from secular point of view, the statement "all dogs go to heaven" is false because heaven doesn't exist; however, the argument that "Victor will go to heaven" is valid regardless of whether the reader is religious or not because, with regards to determining the validity of an argument, we are assuming that all dogs will go to heaven.

I guess the same thing would apply to "Victor is a dog"? Even if we know that Victor is actually a guinea pig, which would render this premise false, the argument is still technically valid based on what's provided to us because we HAVE to accept both premises as true. #help