Having issues wrapping my head around relative v. absolute probability. Will most likely have to default to PoE.

This one was a doozy; I spent a good six minutes trying to figure out what the stimulus was saying, and still didn't full get it until rereading and rewatching the explanations. Here's my take on it:

This philosopher (why is a philosopher saying this?) is basically laying out a rule to start:

To explain why a society is the way it is (like a monarchy such as England or an agrarian civilization such as Egypt), we must first have data about other societies.

That's it. That's basically what the stem is asking us to explain, reworded like this, at least in my opinion, makes it a bit more obvious that it's a conclusion- or something akin to it.

The stim then goes on: (I'm not really a fan of trying to shoehorn in logic and biconditionals, but it's semi-important).

To properly say that a civilization's society was CAUSED by the area that it was built in (think Egypt's farming society with the Nile river, or Ancient China's Han River), we must find evidence that there's NO civilization that was built in the same type of area yet had a different society AND we must find evidence that there's NO civilization that was built in a different area yet had the same society as that of the original.

Imo, even this is still convoluted, so I translated further with terms and societies familiar to me.

Philosopher: To explain why Ancient Egypt had a farming society, we must first gather info about other societies.

For example: If we are to say that the Nile River caused Egypt to be a farming society, we must make sure that there is no other ancient civilization that had a similar river yet was not a farming society AND we must make sure that there is no ancient civilization that had a farming society yet had no river similar to the Nile River.

> You can probably replace 'Ancient Egypt' and 'The Nile River' with corresponding cities/states/nations and a particular feature.

>> Maybe something like Ancient China and its Han River, or something even as modern as Chicago and The Bean. (Chicago is windy because of the bean!!).

If we plug in the correct answer, it'll work on this translation:

"It is the claim that the philosopher attempts to justify by appeal to the requirements for establishing the existence of one kind of causal relationship"

Translated, this just means something like: The excerpt is the philosopher's conclusion in regard to determining whether setting affect civilizations.

and yeah, if we show that there's no case in which a farming society can show up despite not having a river closeby AND that there's no case in which a civilization has a river nearby and is yet not a farming society, then we can say that rivers close to civilizations cause farming societies.

I hope this helps, I had a lot of trouble on this and spent the good part of an hour trying to articulate.

To add onto A: "New technology" is very arbitrary, and part of it seemed to imply that this technology would solve most, if not all the issues- what with the transfer process being expensive and time consuming.

But for all we know, (with the negation) this technology could be barely better than current technology, or shorten the transference time, but cost an obscene amount of money per transfer.

In the end, given these possibilities, this would seem both unnecessary and insufficient.

For some reason, I assumed A with 'applies in this case' meant that it applied for this one year of applications along with all the other years; given that, I assumed it was not relevant, as it would be possible to disregard one year of applications when seeking an explanation for overall application numbers.

I got E, and upon reflecting, I'd also like to add that being "of little use" as stated in E is different than being "unlikely to be useful" as stated in the stimulus and in the correct answer.

Something being of 'little use' could still be useful, maybe something like wirestrippers, which would be 'of little use' unless you're stripping wires.

Whereas 'unlikely to be useful' seem to imply that something just straight up has a better alternative or just wouldn't work for what it's designed to do. My rock-on-a-rope contraption may detect earthquakes, but it's unlikely to be useful when measuring the scale of the earthquake, which is effectively what the conclusion is stating.

I misread... :( Thought C said highly pleasurable experiences don't secrete adrenaline...

As with everyone else, didn't make the in-the-moment connection that distorting history is generally the same as distorting historical awareness.

Would it be OK to categorize everything before the author's opinion as context, in a way? From the way I see it, the author gave us a bunch of context about these three sides, then basically went "in light of that", and gave their new observations.