i knew what equivocal meant, but i didn't know that "retiring" could have 2 different meanings. i feel like this is the type of issue that will never come up again though so i'm not worrying too much about it.

I'm having a ton of trouble seeing how AC B doesn't attack the conclusion.

To restate how I understand the premise and conclusion:

P: many results of chemistry came from alchemy, a pseudoscience

C: we should consider the origins of a discipline when assessing its value

So according to their reasoning, chemistry would have a different value if it didn't come from alchemy but came from legitimate (rational/non-superstitious) origins.

I don't know why we have to consider that chemistry is different from alchemy. Isn't their whole point that we should consider the entire history of a discipline, not just its endpoint? (To compare to thermodynamics, a discipline's value is a path function, not a state function. To mix metaphors further, the ends do not justify the means.)

Their argument is just that the history matters.

To apply their argument to the childhood argument JY uses in the video:

P: Sam used to be stupid but now he's smart

C: we should consider a person's past intelligence when assessing their current intelligence

If their premise was "a person's origins are relevant to their current intelligence," then we could undermine it using AC B.

Aren't they basically just saying the past is relevant to the present and AC B is saying "no it isn't?"

Sorry, this got kind of long and rambly. I'm trying to figure out how to justify AC B to myself.

#Help

this took me way longer than it should have because i refused to accept that arrowheads would increase the casualty rate above spears

It's one hole in the sidewalk, Michael. How long could it take to repair, a few minutes?

I jumped from "developers who would otherwise ignore rarely enforced environmental laws" to "protracted legal battles." I need to stop making assumptions like that. I was also thrown off by the lack of an argument. I think the right way to view it would be to see that environmentalists and property owners/developers are both satisfied and therefore D is a good answer

i threw out (b) because I thought that the stimulus was describing books that the book publishers deemed to have intrinsic merit, which would imply a potentially subjective judgment process. quality is objective. i thought it would be too big of an assumption to equate a publisher's perception of intrinsic merit with quality. i suppose that i was partially blinded by my own bias, though, because (b) is also kind of difficult for me to accept because I don't believe it's true. it's a good reminder to examine the assumptions i'm making and to make sure i am accepting each answer choice as "true."

How do I take PT53 section 4 without taking the other sections? I can see the preptest here https://classic.7sage.com/lesson/preptest-53/ but I can't take section 4 without taking the other 3 sections.

when the stimulus argument is so dumb that you can't even figure out what's wrong with it

as a chemical engineering student i sometimes have trouble figuring out what i can assume in problems like these where i am often tempted to bring in prior knowledge. making the leap that "more fuel efficient" = "doesn't cost more to run" was another one of these tricky cases. luckily, all the other answer choices were unattractive enough that you could still get to the right answer without having to intuit that

Misunderstood the stimulus... a lot of apparent confusion results from not reading these complicated ones thoroughly enough. I didn't realize the last sentence was a conditional statement. I thought they were revising the original generalization. I think a 2nd or 3rd pass would have fixed my misunderstanding.

i had the hardest time understanding AC (e). i thought "individual issues" was referring to books, not magazines. looking back, this seems really obvious, but it took me a long time to figure it out. i still should have seen that (b) left bookstores "unaffected" though. more mechanical parsing would have helped.