I don't understand this one. I understand the meaning of contemporary, and did when I was answering the question, but I think it's kind of ambiguous. I took the meaning of the AC to be an artist contemporary to any time who motivated his contemporaries to fake his work, which is supported by the passage. I took D to be the right answer because in both cultures the categories DO apply. Yes, the author says "in certain cultures authenticity is a foreign concept," but they contradict themselves later in the same paragraph by saying "only the ritual mask should be seen as authentic," thus implying that the replicas are fakes of the authentic, ritual masks.

I know I'm not right, and I know why the right answer is right, but I don't feel like my interpretation is unreasonable enough to be objectively incorrect.

@ksaito_02167 So the way I see it, you're kind of right. The argument would be weird if it were the case that someone else has been found to have psychic powers, but what does it do to the drawing of the conclusion in this argument in particular? The answer is it doesn't really have an effect. Even if it's true that it's absolutely positively known that it's possible to have psychic powers, these people, for whatever reason, are still testing that fact. To convert it to a more readable example, they could be testing whether it's possible for people to have fingernails. As scientists often do, they would be testing something that is of course known to be true; nonetheless, they would find themselves testing the hypothesis, and in doing so, they would infer in this very narrow scope that if it's possible to have fingernails, this person has them.

The only thing these people care about - in other words, the scope of their argument - is whether Selena's claim is true. They believe that the determination of the possibility of having psychic powers rests entirely on this one claim; In other words, they believe that if it's possible to have psychic powers, Selena has them, and her claim is true.

Hope this helps.

@MayaVM That's pretty much correct, the red flag is that it reverses the conditional. The form of the conditional is Elitist -> No respect for masses -> no Respect for Demo. By asserting that anyone who doesn't respect the masses is an elitist, it reverses the first part of the conditional statement, which is invalid. You can only reverse the conditional in a negation, as in Respect for the masses -> Not an elitist.

Without using conditional logic this reasoning becomes more difficult, but essentially you can think of elitists as a category of person who doesn't respect the wisdom of the masses here. The argument states that an elitist doesn't respect the masses, but it doesn't state that people who don't respect the masses are necessarily elitists. So you can think of that answer as inappropriately eliminating other categories of people who don't respect the masses. Without understanding the conditional logic, you can see how eliminating this answer would take more time, but you can arrive at the elimination eventually.

@aikol.iva So I struggled with it too but I think I came around. I believe the strengthening component of the answer is that it eliminates another route one could take to reach the conclusion about cause. In the question about small shoes, for example, the diaper argument is weakened by the fact that babies need shoes and diapers, which makes babies an alternate explanation for the phenomenon. In this case, when considering the hypothesis "iron intake causes PD," an alternate solution is "people with a predisposition to PD just happen to eat more iron, thus making the correlation non-causal." By eliminating this option, the causal hypothesis is strengthened by virtue of a competing causal hypothesis being eliminated. Hope this makes sense.