#help

I initially crossed out B because I didn't want to make the assumption that not exhibiting physiological signs of stress = no stress.

I can't figure out which assumptions are reasonable to make. Any input would be appreciated!

Congratulations! Also struggling a lot with RC, and would love any tips you have. Do you know the timeline for when you'll be releasing these? Thanks :)

I struggled with C and D. I ended up eliminating C because of the word "OR". If they failed to notify just one of these places, but the survey shows data results from both the post office and the DMV, either one will capture the individuals who failed to notify one of these places. I feel like I would've been way more tempted to choose it if it said "AND" instead of OR.

This was suuuuuch an annoying question.

The big distinction here is between "passed on" and "inserted". When I do strengthen questions, I tend to screw up because I give myself tunnel vision into looking at what will make the argument stronger by adding new information in (a direct positive support). I fail to look out for answers that may be covering up weaknesses which is exactly what answer choice C is doing.

I was between C and E and could not for the life of me see why C would be right so I picked E and moved on because I made an assumption that E was saying it doesn't KILL off the animals. When it was talking merely about the likelihood of its survival which could go both ways.

When the fragments are passed on through the descendants, they tend to stay in the same spot. However, when they're INSERTED, the insertion can happen at a random spot. So answer choice C is covering for that weakness by saying that the insertion occurs at a random spot, which if true, would be extremely unlikely to have happened to both of the bird species at the exact same spot. But since the fragments were found in a similar spot of the two birds, we can say that the argument's conclusion is more valid. Answer choice C rules out an alternative explanation which in turn strengthens the argument's hypothesis.

Still hate this question, would not have understood it without J.Y's explanation, so shoutout to J.Y., the closest thing to human interaction I've had all throughout 2020.

During timed, I picked D, but ended up choosing C in BR because I started overthinking.

I thought C was providing a "control group" cookie-cutter strengthening answer (E.g. Section 1 LR of this PT, Q 10).

But having watched J.Y's explanation, there's a few things wrong with answer choice C:

1) It states a premise we are already supposed to be assuming. The stimulus tells us the theory and the following hypothesis that emotion impacts the singing of the parents. When they're asking for the 2 recordings of the singing, we are already assuming that the parents don't feel emotion when they're singing not to their children (kind of like a binary cut situation that J.Y. often mentions, either they feel emotion, or they don't, those are the only 2 worlds). Having an assumption we already made while reading laid out as an answer choice is very attractive, but doesn't ADD any support to strengthen the argument.

2) the use of the word "displayed" instead of "felt"

3) "little emotion" indicates that they are in fact feeling a small amount of emotion which if you think about it, can actually weaken the argument because if they feel emotional while singing to their children, and they also feel little emotion while singing not to their children, the experiment is just worthless. Also, the researchers don't specify HOW emotional the parents feel when singing to their children in the hypothesis, so if they felt little emotion while they sang to their children, then answer choice C pretty much weakens the argument.

D bolsters the researchers' hypothesis without leaving room for any holes, and so it's the better answer choice.

To anyone that may need to hear this - I've always found comments to be helpful when I still feel puzzled after watching J.Y's videos so I think if you have a Eureka! moment for a question, it would be really valuable for the 7sagers and yourself to put it in the comments! This is my first long comment, and though I had all of these thoughts after seeing the right answer, they were brief and I didn't really process them. Writing them down in the comments is really forcing me to think about what I'm saying and therefore reassuring my thought process. I wish I had started doing this earlier even though it can be time-consuming!