PTF97.S3.Q16 - Zebra mussels, a nuisance

juliafisk

I am struggling to understand how this answer is supported by the stimulus. To run through my thoughts:

A: irrelevant, there is nothing about clams in the passage
B: irrelevant, we are not discussing the mussels spreading to the Mississippi or the effects on the pear industry
C: we don't have any information about removing the mussels from the areas they clog
This is the one I picked though I went back and forth between D and E. I picked D because it seemed to be the most related to the stimulus. The stimulus talks about how the mussels clog the intake pipes at the beginning and then transitions to talking about how bags of mussels suspended in discharge streams help clean water. I assumed without proof that the algae would just clog intake pipes as well.
E: This one seems like a logical conclusion, but I didn't think there was enough direct support in the stimulus to justify this conclusion. It seems like quite a jump to me to assume that the mussels will need to be discarded as hazardous waste.

Any advice or help on making the assumptions that need to be made in MSS problems? #help

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Clemens_

Consider that you can reformulate any disjunction ('A or B') into a conditional ('not A -> B') and vice versa. Consider further how this applies to (E): We have not TRANSFORM DISCHARGE -> KEEP DISCHARGE IN MUSSELS, which gets us the information that the mussels either transform the discharge or keep it in themselves.

The stimulus makes it very likely that one of these options indeed must be fulfilled; after all, we know that the mussels significantly improve the water quality around them. That is, whatever discharge there might have been originally, once it comes in touch with the mussels, it is either transformed or preserved in these mussels / filtered out from the surrounding water. Otherwise, how could the water surrounding the mussels get clean?