For 18, I intuitively disliked C so didn't pick it, so I picked E even though it wasn't great. The passage doesn't say that most tropical isolated species survive, just that relative to the arctic, more isolated tropical species survive. E could very well be true then while doing nothing at all to actually weaken the argument - suppose that NONE of the isolated arctic species were to survive - then, most in the tropics could die while still not weakening the hypothesis remotely.

C intuitively dissatisfied me, but strengthening an alternative hypothesis may weaken the speciation hypothesis. The wording basically states that the sufficient condition provided for accepting the energy hypothesis is met, and, if these hypotheses are taken to be mutually exclusive, this is fatal to speciation. We are however, never told that hypotheses are mutually exclusive, so I didn't pick this. I also meta-gamed this question and knew that the test writers wanted E and were trying to get a reader to confuse the hypotheses with each other.

E actually does directly support the conclusion if we apply the contrapositive to what it is saying. Roughly translated it becomes

if an organization doesn't have the primary goal of promoting public health, then it shouldn't provide things necessary for human health

Tricky question! I picked the right choice but the choice between C and D was an intuitive one for me. It makes sense the way you explained it - the conclusion is a conditional!

Would C still be wrong if it said "estimates" instead of "written estimates"?

I got this question right when I took it, but wrong in blind review. In BR I selected E. We cannot assume E is wrong for the reason given in the video - we need to assume the truth of the premise, and the specific group it says that we should not help is those who will not grow up to have nightmares. This was appealing to me because the conclusion said specifically that we should try to IDENTIFY those kids who will grow up to have nightmares. Why specifically identify? Why not just teach everyone the technique?

Well, if the technique is possibly harmful, then that explains why we specifically need to identify kids who will grow up to have nightmares, rather than just teaching every kid.

If we assume the truth of E, it explains why specifically the conclusion took the form that it did. It seemed appealing because of the very weird way that the conclusion specified we need to try to identify the kids who will have nightmares as adults.

There is a way better reason to cut A out in my opinion. The stimulus only ever makes a point about economic feasibility, and we can still do something even if it is not economically feasible. I would argue this exact idea applies to the moon landing and most space exploration - if NASA was accountable to deliver any profits or a cost-benefit it would be an economically horrible idea. We could very well be willing to just eat the costs in the name of science or discovery or whatever the hell. I think assuming stuff comes from earth is not that big an assumption

Why does them being butchered mean they can't be ridden? Why are those mutually exclusive?

I disagree with the reason given for eliminating B - obscuring would make it more difficult, but B says it makes it LESS likely for the ball to be obscured. Its still wrong because it just makes no sense - how would the adult's body possibly obscure a ball that they are throwing? The adult's body cannot be between the ball that they have thrown at the child unless they're throwing it behind themselves by which point we are making an absurd assumption.

I agree with your first problem for A, but isn't a much bigger problem than the second one you cited that these answers cannot account for the fact that a decrease in size was measured? If smaller beaked ones were easier to capture, they would have caught smaller ones from the start - the puzzling thing is that they were measured the same at the start, and later were measured smaller, meaning that the smaller size cannot account for the difference unless the smaller ones weren't easier to catch until the end of the study

I nearly picked E because of the simple fact that it didn't say that journalists are more likely now than in the past to be criticized for failing to be objective. This means that while it adequately explains why they might not criticize things, it doesnt really explain why they don't criticize as much these days as some time ago.

Did I miss something?

Is D really incomplete? The idea that D could refer to both groups never crossed my mind because of the word "replaced". The word "replace" couldn't reasonably be used to describe the group that isn't eliminating meat from their diet in the first place since it entails swapping one thing for another.

I rejected C because the stimulus says that it BEGINS to deteriorate after 3 months. If it only starts to, you may have a little extra time.

Reason I wrote off E was because I thought it wouldn't be risky if it had had indoor seating - I missed the fact that it said "the restaurant" and not "a restaurant". Bummer.

I think that the reason given for dismissing E is incorrect - the logic is ALMOST equivalent to D, and only makes a minor mistake.

Domain: independent, West Calverton pet stores

T - Tropical Fist

B - Bird

Our DeMorgan gets us /T V B

E: can be translated to /T -> B, which is ALMOST correct - we can translate /T V B as T -> B.

If somebody was doing their logic and made the minor mistake of forgetting to flip the sign while converting a disjunction to a conditional it would be the most correct looking answer choice.

I wish there had been a mini drill to let us try this one before it was covered

The reason I excluded A is that we have no reason to believe that that would be changing over time as we should explain. Same goes for C and D. ONLY E explains the change over time

I'd push back a little bit on the dismissal of B. Wealthier countries tend to have people who live longer, and cancer is a late life illness. We actually do observe in political science that wealthier countries have more cancer because the lifespans are on average longer.

The really key thing here is not the qualitative nature of A, but what he says at around 3:40 - the actual rule given says that as "one" gets older they get wiser - this does not actually enable comparisons between people. If it compared Henrietta to herself 10 years ago it would be valid. C actually does this (compares the cyclist to himself 10 years ago), but with the other premise mismatched.

Anybody else misread D completely? I thought it was saying that because she had cavities she has to chew on the side with cavities and I was like "huh? If you have cavities wouldn't you want to use the other side to avoid it hurting?" I wouldn've still marked it as wrong even if it said right because I would have thought it was prescriptively saying to use the other side of your mouth to avoid it hurting.

The reason this problem was hard for me was that "any other option" made me think of other methods of conservation, and I didn't realize that was referential to the specific activity of finding new ways to dispose of nuclear waste

If 12 A can be correct despite it never being mentioned in passage B, how can we possibly eliminate any of the unmentioned choices in our first pass of A?

As we await explanations that are official I will provide the explanations as I can best elaborate them:

21: C is correct - we are told in line 2-3 that Darwin's conception has "long dominated anthropology", and the new research that challenges his conception is taphonomy. The alternative view is of course the conception of hominids as scavengers.

A is incorrect: Darwin's theories are not about "hunter gatherer societies", but rather about how they got their food.

B is incorrect: the traditional methodologies are not being challenged, rather a new type of methodology is introduced which questions a conception that was based on incomplete evidence. The passage never denies the evidence that the old conception used, it only questions its conclusions.

D is incorrect: It is true information, but is far too narrow in scope, only mentioning the contents of paragraph 1 and could not properly be called the main idea.

E is incorrect: The recent discoveries could not really be called related to the environment - while we know that there were more predators back then, this was already known by the Darwinians - the Darwinians believed that we simply outsmarted these old predators, while the new theorists believe humans had to avoid them and scavenge.

22: C is correct: Lines 15-20 tell us that the failure of anthropologists was to consider the sophistication of modern hunter gatherers, and the ways their environment differs. Answer choice C directly refers to the way that their environment differs, as we are told modern ones do not have to contend with large predators like our ancestors did.

A is incorrect: In mentioning modern hunter gatherers, the author is refuting a claim Darwinians are using to support their argument. The Darwinians make the implicit assumption that modern hunter gatherers and our ancestors lived the same, and the author is questioning this. For answer choice A to be correct, our modern hunter gatherers would have to also be dealing with large predators and have the same circumstances, or else the taphonomy investigation would yield different results.

B: The difference between modern hunter gatherer societies is irrelevant. If you misread this as "the similarities between lifestyles of modern hunters and our ancestors", the use of "the various societies" indicates this is referential to the group identified in the question stem which is NOT our ancestors.

D: 1 century is totally irrelevant in the time scales we are talking about, and this has no support. In fact we have anti-support as the author goes after Darwinians for using the similarity of close ancestors like Neanderthals to make assumptions about much older relatives.

E: Industrialization is nowhere mentioned, this is completely irrelevant.

23: This one requires understanding the stimulus well and a little imagination.

D is correct: we are told 42-43 that teeth marks underlay the stone tools: this means the animals were bit by predatory animals before humans got to them with their stone tools. That means we were probably scavenging.

A is incorrect: the author isn't comparing hominids of different eras, but that they scavenge carnivore kills.

B is incorrect: we once again arent comparing hominid-hominid competition but identifying that they were scavenging from predators.

C is incorrect: The evidence is properly identified but the conclusion simply makes no sense - if hominids couldn't move fast enough to hunt them then how are their tool marks on them? Furthermore, why would they be overlayed?

E is incorrect: no indication is given about prey preference anywhere.

24: B is correct - 50-51 tells us that "early hominids could have been well adapted for scavenging", and one of the pieces of evidence provided in support of this hypothesis is their upright stature.

A is incorrect: it is never indicated taht there existed another hypothesis about how they walked

C is incorrect: The author actually goes against this, since the author talks about how upright walking helps hominids to identify carcasses (meat) to scavenge on 54-55.

D is incorrect: Resemblance is unmentioned in the text, and the author indicates no desire to convince us of how similar we looked to our forebears

E is incorrect: The author mentions no animal to compare the hominids to, only how hominids are well adapted to scavenging.

25: This question sucks, and requires a close reading of paragraph 1

B is correct: the coincidence identified in paragraph 1 was that Darwinian's belief that modern hunter gatherers and our ancestors are quite similar comes from the fact that we found our closest ancestors first. We found neanderthals, who are really close to us, before we found reeeaalllyyy distant ancestors, who presumably aren't so close to us. This lead to the mistaken impression that because the neanderthals were close to us, the much older ones must be close to us too. B is similar in its line of reasoning, because it concludes from a work of art quite close to the artist's recent work something about MUCH older work.

A is incorrect: the analogy within this choice would be that the age of evidence was misidentified, when the proper age of the hominids was in fact identified. The problem isn't that we thought early hominids were actually only 5000 years old when they were actually older, but that we found much more recent ancestors first.

C is incorrect: Once again, the age of the hominids has not been misidentified, what was mistaken was the conclusion on the mistaken belief that the much older homindis were similar to the much more recent ones.

D is incorrect: they did not find that something very old was close to something recent - that would actually support the Darwinians! Imagine if they found a very early hominid and actually found it was nearly identical to the neanderthal - that would be good for the Darwinians, and actually is the opposite of what hte passage describes!

E is incorrect: This is the closest answer choice - it identified the analogy that characteristics of the old were misidentified with characteristics of more recent ones, but isn't strong enough. The Darwinians do not merely try to find similarities between our distant hominid ancestors and more recent ones like neanderthals, they merely assume that because the neanderthals are like us, they must be as well. If I fixed E, it would say that botanists assume an unknown prehistoric plant is identical to a better known prehistoric plant.

26: This is the only one I got wrong - it trades on a stupid technicality.

C is correct: 33 indeed says that the fossils are approximately 2 million years old, but it NEVER says that this was found out by taphonomy. Furthermore, we have reason to believe it wasn't - taphonomy is identifying scratches and other features of bones - how would it even date the bones based on that information?

A is incorrect: we are told that taphonomy can identify the layering of marks, which naturally means the order can be ascertained. (line 42-43)

B is incorrect: we are told that marks differ depending on where they come from - tool, abrastion, or predator (line 36-39)

D is incorrect: we are told that taphonomy can identify where marks came from (line 36-39)

E is incorrect: we are told one method of taphonomy is comparing to modern bones (line 35-36)

27: D is correct - we are revising our approach to how hominids survived, and on the basis of new evidence from taphonomy and uncovering the unwarranted assumptions about how comparable early hominids were to recent relatives.

A is incorrect: what outdated research methods? Taphonomy is mentioned, but no current method is ever questioned.

B is incorrect: This is indeed done in paragraph 1, but is far from the purpose of the entire passage.

C is incorrect: What? What historical events? This is anthropology.

E is incorrect: We are never given any reason to believe a theory was replaced. We are never told whether the new taphonomic conception is actually accepted in lieu of Darwin's, and in fact we are told that Darwin's concept has long dominated anthropology.

I will try to answer to any questions you may have.

24 actually seemed pretty clear to me - don't just read the sentence, but the sentences immediately before and after. If you read those, it becomes clear that the context of that phrase is the potential for specific neurons to be influenced by medications, which would in turn mean the ability to distinguish between neurons that do certain things

I don't understand really. Wouldn't you want you show to reach more people since more people have more purchasing power?

I was really stuck between A and B - since Craig never gave evidence as to why they were lost I wondered if the burden of proof had been met to dismiss that answer choice. Also if you write what Craig said as Lost -> Stop instead of as just stating Lost, A looks more attractive.