A
People usually adopt beliefs without carefully assessing the evidence for and against those beliefs.
B
People’s perceptions of the fairness of a policy sometimes depend on whether that policy benefits them personally.
C
People usually become emotional when considering financial issues.
D
People often change their minds about issues that do not make significant differences to their lives.
E
People’s evaluations of a situation sometimes depend less on the situation itself than on how it is presented to them.
Several Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons found in North America contain tooth marks that only a large carnivore could have made. At the time T. rex lived, it was the only large carnivore in North America. The tooth marks could have resulted only from combat or feeding. But such tooth marks would have been almost impossible to inflict on the skeleton of a live animal.
Summary
There are several T. Rex skeletons found in North America with tooth marks that could only have been made by a large carnivore. T. Rex were the only large carnivores in North America when they lived. The tooth marks could only have resulted from combat or feeding. These tooth marks would have been impossible to inflict on the skeleton of a live animal.
Strongly Supported Conclusions
The tooth marks on the T. Rex skeletons are likely a product of other T. Rex’s feeding on T. Rex bodies.
A
T. rex regularly engaged in combat with smaller carnivores.
This is unsupported because we don’t have information about tooth marks being found on the skeletons of other carnivores or any other evidence of such combat.
B
At the time T. rex lived, it was common for carnivores to feed on other carnivores.
This is unsupported because even though T. Rex appears to have fed on other T. Rex, we don’t know that this was common for other carnivores.
C
T. rex sometimes engaged in cannibalism.
This is strongly supported because we know that the marks on the skeletons could only have come from other T. Rex’s, and they could only have been made during feeding on an already dead animal.
D
T. rex sometimes engaged in intraspecies combat.
This is unsupported because the marks on the skeletons could only have been made on already dead animals, which precludes the marks being made during combat.
E
At the time T. rex lived, there were large carnivores on continents other than North America.
This is unsupported because we don’t know anything about the distribution of carnivores across other continents. The stimulus is confined to discussing North America.