It might reasonably have been expected that the adoption of cooking by early humans would not have led to any changes in human digestive anatomy. █████ ████ ███████ █████ ████ ██████ ██ ████ █████ █████ ████ ██ ███████ ███████████ ███ ████████ ██ ███████ ██████ █████ ███
Other People’s Argument ·Cooking didn’t lead to changes in human digestive anatomy
Author's Hypothesis ·Cooking evolutionarily changed human digestion
We evolved to efficiently digest high and densely caloric foods thanks to cooking. Now we are reliant on cooked foods and cannot survive on raw food alone.
Cooking resulted in decrease in tooth and jaw size. Evidence of cooking techniques developing and decreases in tooth and jaw size support the cooking hypothesis.
Anti-supported. How could the author think a raw-food diet is healthier if she also believes we typically can’t survive on a raw-food diet? Don’t bring in your own assumptions about the healthiness of raw food.
Not supported, because we simply have no evidence how long humans controlled fire before they started to cook. The author mentions that evidence of fire and “earth ovens” goes back more than 250,000 years. But did humans use fire long before cooking? We don’t know.
7%
d
The practice of ██████ █ ████ ██ ██████ ████ ███ ███ ██████ ████████ █████ ██████ ████ ████ ██ ████ ██████████ █████████ ██████
Not supported, because the author never connects the widespread practice of eating cooked food to the beginning of sedentary lives. Although we a sedentary life is one of the unusual circumstances that might allow one to live on only raw food, there’s no other mention of sedentary lives.
Supported. Notice that the author says at the end of P2 that reductions in tooth and jaw size “may prove to result” from cooking. The author also states that evidence “suggests” eating cooked food caused tooth and jaw size reductions.
55%
Difficulty
57% of people who answer get this correct
This is a difficult question.
It is similar in difficulty to other questions in this passage.
CURVE
Score of students with a 50% chance of getting this right
25%149
158
75%168
Analysis
Author’s perspective
Author’s perspective
Stems that ask us to find an answer the author is most likely to agree with.
Stems asking us to infer an idea implied by the claims in the passage (as opposed to identifying an idea that appears explicitly). Similar to most strongly supported questions in LR.
Critique or debate passages contain multiple points of view on a particular subject. Sometimes the author takes sides and participates in the critique or debate, other times the author merely reports the debate.
Passages that focus on describing or evaluating potential explanations for a given phenomenon. Causal reasoning features prominently in these passages.