i find what helps is to plug in the stimulus information in place of the general language. When i looked at AC A, i replaced "infers that something that is sufficient to provide a motive is necessary to provide a motive." with "infers that harsh criticism being sufficient to provide a motive is necessary to provide a motive", which made clearer that the argument was confusing sufficiency and necessity. hope this helps!

The stimulus says important types of medicine have been developed from substances that were discovered in plants that grow only in tropical rain forests. This describes a causal chain: tropical rainforests (TR) --> plants --> substances (in the plants) --> important medicine.

The stimulus then says that there are thousands of plant species in tropical rainforests that HAVEN'T been studied yet, and that it's highly likely that these unstudied plants contain substances of medicinal value, meaning they could lead to the development of more important types of medicine.

The conclusion is that if tropical rainforests are not preserved, important types of medicine won't ever be created, because that causal chain breaks (no tropical rainforests means there will be no plants to study, which means no substances to be discovered, which means no medicine to be developed).

The question stem asks for an assumption needed in order for this argument to hold, which is where answer A comes in. A says that there are substances in tropical rainforest plants with medicinal value that haven't been studied that are different from the substances in the plants that were already studied. Essentially, there are new, undiscovered substances in unstudied plants that can lead to the development of new important medicines. The problem is that if the rainforests aren't preserved, we'll never have a chance to study those plants, meaning we won't be able to discover these new substances, meaning we won't be able to create new important meds.

This assumption is needed because the argument rests on the conclusion that important types of medicine (ones we don't already have) won't be developed without preserving of the rainforests. And for new meds to be developed, we'd need to discover new substances, which are likely in the plants that haven't been studied yet. If all of the plants (unstudied or not) only contained substances we've already discovered, then why preserve the rainforest? we wouldn't be able to develop any new meds if we didn't find any new substances. Its necessary then to assume that there are different substances from the ones we've already found that are in plants that haven't been studied, which is what answer A says.

sorry this is so long lol but hopefully this helps/makes a little more sense!!

Hi! I think its all about making sure you can pick apart the grammar that test writers use to trick you. Answer B says "a novel", but it further modifies that general set by saying "a novel" that "poetically condenses a major emotional crisis". The stimulus says that "each of colette's novel's is a poetic condensation of a major emotional crisis", so that then tells us that colette's novels fit into the set described in answer B.

Hopefully this helps!

i'd agree, but i think A requires you to make a way wider assumptions to make the rule fit whereas E lays out the rule plainly. I dont think A is relevant or specific enough to satisfy the rules that this conclusion sets out. the overall point is that manufacturers who could have prevented injury should be held responsible, which is what E says. It doesn't really matter how they are held responsible (like financial compensation).

i did the same thing!! from what i understand, C was wrong because it offered another reason as to why the mosaic shouldn't have been moved, but the question ultimately asks us to pick an answer that supports the already drawn reason/conclusion. C ends up being irrelevant because its claims are addressed in the stimulus and like you said, it adds no additional justification, it just offers a different reason.

i think A ends up being the correct choice because it reinforces the claims that all the research done (past or future) on the mosaics will be only for archeological purposes. the reasons why the mosaics should've/shouldn't have been moved are purely archeological reasons, and A supports that conclusion. i didn't think that A was really supportive,, but ultimately it was more justifiable than all the other options which makes it the right one.

hopefully that makes a little more sense!

i remembered a lesson in foundations that said that the upper boundaries of "some" could include "all". not sure if that logic applies here, but it came to mind so i just went with it. if it does, then it would track that diversity across some cultures could just as well mean diversity across all cultures.

also i think the point of answering these questions is not to find the "right" answer, but the one that matches most closely. Regardless of how supportive the right answer actually is, what's important is that its more supportive than every other potential answer.

I was more confident in B because i saw D as a reasonable explanation as to why the additional space on the planes would more likely be given to passenger seating. D states that in 20 years, it will be impossible for airports to accommodate enough normal-sized planes to carry that number of passengers. But that is not the primary point of the argument. Based on the context given in the first sentence, we know that planes are being developed to hold more space for various things. The overall point is that the space will most likely be used for passenger seating, because in 20 years it will be impossible to accommodate passengers on normal sized planes without the new seating.

I also think that if you flipped it around (where B is a premise and D is a conclusion), it isn't as supportive of a claim to say that in 20 years it will be impossible to accommodate passengers on normal sized planes (D) because the new developments to airplanes will most likely be used for additional passenger seating (B).

Hopefully this makes sense!

This is how i understand it,, I'm still learning though so I might be wrong!

Correlation is a relationship between A and B (like smoking and lung cancer). The correlation suggests that smoking increases the risk of getting lung cancer. Yes, there is an increased risk of lung cancer when you smoke, but getting lung cancer from smoking is not guaranteed, which is why it wouldn't be a strong causal argument. Non-smokers can get lung cancer, and some smokers have never gotten cancer. There is a relationship between smoking and lung cancer, but smoking is not the cause of every case of lung cancer.

Causation would say that while A and B have a relationship, the difference is that A is the direct cause of B (B then is the effect), like the dolphin/chemical spill example from the other lessons (chemical spill (A) kills dolphins (B), therefore A causes B).

Chronology is useful in causation. If we argue that A causes B, then A must happen before B for that hypothesis to hold true. Ie, the chemical spill (A) must have happened before the dolphins died (B). But in correlation, causes are only suggested, not implied or certain. Ie., one can start smoking before or after getting lung cancer. you don't have to smoke to get lung cancer, or vice versa.

Causal mechanisms further solidify/discredit a hypothesis. In the dolphin example, the failure of the mining company to line their dumping site allowed toxins to contaminate the soil, and this soil then contaminated the water after it rained. This is how the chemicals poisoned the dolphins, resulting in their death. Here, the causal mechanism explains exactly why/how poisoned water caused dolphin deaths. You could come up with something similar for smoking and lung cancer, but the mechanism would still fail to explain how some smokers never get lung cancer, or some smokers do because these 2 sub-phenomena are not causal, they're just related.

hopefully this helps a little!