LR Drill Set 9, Question 1
Dinosaurs inhabited nearly every part of the earth(78 more words not shown)
Which one of the following,(16 more words not shown)
- AFlowering plants began(9 more words not shown)
- BWhatever caused the(18 more words not shown)
- CFlowering plants emerged(14 more words not shown)
- DFlowering plants were(11 more words not shown)
- EThe emergence of(13 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Why couldn't the dinosaurs keep eating the other plants?
Let's grant that they couldn't digest the new flowering plants. That doesn't yet explain starvation.
If grass starts growing near my house, I don't have to eat it. I can keep eating potatoes and other foods I can digest. We'd need to know what happened to the dinosaurs' existing food supply before concluding that the arrival of an inedible plant killed them.
The passage also describes dinosaurs adapting to different habitats over a very long time. These weren't animals confined to one small place with one unchanging environment. That makes the proposed explanation worth questioning, even before we look at the choices.
What we’re looking for
The question asks why the flowering-plant explanation is weak. We're attacking that explanation, not trying to rescue it. My first thought is still the other food: what if dinosaurs could simply ignore the flowers and eat what they had eaten before? Let's see what evidence the answers actually provide.
Working the answers
- A
Flowers appearing in different parts of the world at the same time doesn't tell us whether dinosaurs could eat them, avoid them, or adapt to them. The geographic timing doesn't expose a problem with the proposed starvation explanation.
- B
This separates the cause of the dinosaurs' disappearance from the causes of other losses. But which category would flowering plants fall into? B doesn't say. Without a connection between the proposed cause and those other extinctions, this doesn't give us a reason to reject flowering plants as the cause of the dinosaurs' extinction.
- CCorrect
This gives us a different objection from the other-food prediction. The plants emerged gradually, and the dinosaurs likely would have adapted. Why assume that animals capable of adapting to so many environments suddenly couldn't adapt to this gradual change?
The answer directly challenges the claim that their inability to digest the new plants would have led to extinction. It doesn't prove that every dinosaur could digest every flower. It supplies a reason to expect adaptation rather than the proposed starvation.
- D
Surviving an event doesn't establish what caused it. The flowers could have survived whether they caused the dinosaurs' starvation or had nothing to do with it. We need to test the proposed cause, not just list which groups survived.
- E
This is tempting because the passage mentions a larger mass extinction. But the scientists' explanation concerns dinosaurs. A cause could kill dinosaurs without accounting for every other species lost during the same period. E does not establish that the dinosaurs themselves could not have died for the proposed reason. C directly challenges that explanation by addressing their likely response to the plants.
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