AC A got me the first attempt. It seemed to me that in order to conclude that the ice had temporarily melted you would first have to accept that the ice had been there in the first place, which is what the widely held belief basically describes. So, the conclusion takes it to be true in that sense, but it opposes it by saying that the 14 millions years of ice coverage wasn't continuous, which is why AC A cannot be an accurate description.
I chose C first go through then switched to B in blind review because of the superlative in the conclusion "surest road". I reasoned that the surest road to financial prosperity would have the highest (matching the superlative use in the conclusion) profits which the argument did not support family businesses having. Reading answer choice B made think that maybe that's what the author was trying to imply in the conclusion (surest road = highest profits) but failed to provide the reasoning for why they had the highest profits.
However, my assumption (that the author was trying to imply that family businesses had the highest profits) is not that reasonable next to answer choice C which accurately describes an explicit flaw in the argument.
@ GOAT
Its making a conclusion about a population from a sample that is not likely to be representative. In the stimulus, the last week of the theater's operation drew sellout crowds, likely because everyone knows it is the last week and wants to go before it is gone forever and not because the owner's claim of not being able to regularly attract large enough crowds was false and, implicitly, that the theater can actually draw large crowds regularly.
AC C a meeting is held about proposed cuts in library funding. Given the subject of the meeting its likely that students who have strong feelings about the cuts to library funding would attend to make their voice heard, and those people would be in higher proportion relative to the proportion they make up of the entire population. This AC presents the sample of students who attended a meeting about a subject as evidence that all enrolled students have the same opinion.
There is a certain type of bias, I think it is called nonresponse bias, that describes the poor methodology that is analogous to the reasoning in AC C. Think of like a yelp review. Generally people don't bother leaving a review unless they were really upset about something, because they don't have to. Therefore you're likely to see a higher proportion of bad reviews from angry customers than what is truly representative of all customers. Basically, if something is not mandatory (attending a meeting about library funding) you can expect that the people not attending/responding don't really care about the issue, and that the people who have strong feelings about the issue are more likely to respond.
This question is very similar to PT88.S2.Q24. I credit my getting this question right to getting the question from PT88 wrong first and reviewing intensely. People that got this one wrong and need extra review should check that one out.
If someone could explain their reasoning behind how they reached the correct answer to this question it would be much appreciated.
Admin Note: Edited title. Please use the format: "PT#.S#.Q# - brief description of the question."
The referent "this practice" when attached back properly reveals the assumption here. The US manufactures a pesticide and this same pesticide is on produce imported to the US. Was the pesticide on the imported produce manufactured in the US? If not then "this practice" can't be said to be harmful to US consumers.
AC C does not weaken the argument because it is consistent with the argument being made against the predominant theory.
The cave paintings are allegedly descriptions of the current diets of the painters. This is said to be wrong because the painters couldn't have made it to the island without eating sea animals. From this, all we know about the paintings is that they do not depict sea animals. Land animals fit under the very broad domain of not sea animals, so this would be entirely consistent with the argument.
AC B is wrong because it repeats the exact wording describing the relationship of physics and chemistry to engineering. This is an analogy. When is it ever necessary for things being analogized to be described in the exact same way? Physics and chemistry don't have to determine the material conditions of physiology to be analogous to their relationship to engineering. They could provide any other kind of fundamental knowledge for physiology and still be analogous.
AC C is correct because it points out the assumption that for physiology, the organ's roles that physiologists analyze an organism in terms of provide something analogous to a notion of purpose. Its a hard assumption to spot since role and purpose are close in meaning and this is an analogy. Without being careful its easy to blindly follow the assumption that organ's roles provide something like a notion of purpose.
I think a big difficulty for me, and the main reason I got this question wrong, was too narrowly interpreting the question. After reading the question stem, I only thought about the different interpretations of the feminist opposition of the labor laws, since that seemed to be the main focus in the passage.
The question stem actually asks what the passage suggests about how the two schools of thought would differ in their writing of history of 19th century protective labor laws as a whole, not just the feminist opposition. The passage explicitly states how the two schools of thought differ fundamentally. To paraphrase, liberal legal historians analyze this era through the lens of the age of collectivism (shift in societal ideas) and characterize the passage of protective labor laws as starting with women and children and then eventually to men (gradual law change). The labor historians comparatively focus much more on class. The passage states that middle class feminists were the head of the opposition and that those middle class feminists were not thinking of the consequences for working class women. Labor historians are also said to believe that the feminist opposition was selfish due to it being rooted in privilege, and ignoring the opportunity to rethink the economic bases of social relations. Based on these fundamental differences in analyzing history, the passage suggests AC A.
To answer your question, I think you may have misinterpreted a portion of the passage. The reforms are the passage of protective labor laws for women. These were opposed by middle class and privileged women according to the labor historians. According to labor historians the people who benefitted from protective labor laws would be the laborers. Later in the passage it is discussed how men and the British government would benefit from these reforms, but this belief is not ascribed to the labor historians.
I had B as my AC initially but changed it because I thought that any given one of the 60 problems not being one that afflicts most people really isn't a problem for the argument. It could be 10 of the problems studied that, together, comprise the problems most people have. If these 10 showed the same 50 week trend, then the conclusion seems reasonable. My reading of this AC was skewed by my anticipation of an AC that calls out a different flaw that I registered when reading the stimulus, which was that the 60 problems studied could all be extremely rare problems, since the commonality of them was not stated.
Don't anchor yourself to the flaws you perceived if the none of the ACs articulate them.
For anyone that picked AC B like I did, a catastrophe is sudden, and a drought is not sudden. It is gradual. Therefore AC B must be wrong.