PT59.S2.Q21 - essayist: when the first prehistoric

cacrv567

https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-59-section-2-question-21
Struggling so hard with why C is right and E is wrong. I didn't like either answer choice but under time pressure, chose E because thought C was challenging the premise. I've watched JY's vid and read the available forum posts. I get that "implausible" leaves room for the premise to be bent. But all this is just muddled in my brain now.

I'd really appreciate it if someone could explain this in a different way so I can find a way for this to stick in my head and figure out how to attack similar questions in the future and where I went wrong!

Accounts Playable

Tough weaken question; I had to read the argument a few times before I saw what was going on.

When people moved from Asia to America, they saw a ton of animals that would be extinct in 2000 years. It isn't likely that hunting was the reason for their extinction. Microorganisms not native to America came with the human migrants and along with some animals that came with them. Therefore, the microorganisms are probably the cause of the extinctions.

What I am looking for: The argument doesn't tell us anything about the microorganisms besides the fact that they cause disease. But are the diseases virulent? What if they could only give the animals a common cold? Can't the microorganism theory be extremely implausible, too? Also, the argument flat out dismisses another cause (hunting) but gives no reason why. What makes hunting implausible or the microorganism theory presumably more plausible?

Answer A: Do we know the animals were weakened? Too many assumptions here.

Answer B: Irrelevant. We don't care about the biology of humans.

Answer C: This is good. This gives evidence for the alternative theory (hunting). If very few (strong wording) of the extinct species weren't hunted, then this suggests that hunting was a cause. It certainly casts doubt on the idea that microorganisms are "probably" the cause. It doesn't deny a premise because because it isn't contradicting the idea that hunting is implausible. Maybe even with this additional piece of evidence, hunting is still implausible. All this answer choice does is support one of the theories over the other, which weakens the argument's conclusion.

Answer Who cares if they suffer from the disease?

Answer E: This answer choice doesn't do very much. First, the "some" is pretty weak language, and those types of answer choices are rarely attractive for weaken/strengthen questions. So, one species became extinct more than 2000 years after the humans arrived. It could be the case that one species became extinct in the year 2016; that's outside the time-frame of what the problem is asking about. Even if you are charitable and say that 1 million species died 2001 years after the humans got there, you still don't know what caused the extinction. Was it microorganisms or hunting?

cacrv567

@"Accounts Playable" thanks so much - I definitely see why E is wrong - EUREKA.

Clearly, I misread C because, this is how I understood C:
Two groups of animals at this time - hunted (100), not hunted (100). "Very few" of those not hunted (3) were extinct. So 97 in the not hunted group was fine.

And at that point, I just didn't see how C weakened the argument.

I'm trying to understand if this was a grammar problem or if I just didn't understand the stim? Thanks again, really appreciate your time.