PrepTest 107, Section 1, Question 25
The indigenous people of Tasmania are clearly related(79 more words not shown)
Each of the following, if(11 more words not shown)
- AAfter the disappearance(22 more words not shown)
- BDevices such as(16 more words not shown)
- CTechnological innovations such(22 more words not shown)
- DIndigenous people of(17 more words not shown)
- EAlthough the technological(36 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Two thousand years is a long time for separated groups to develop differently. Think how much can change in fifty years. So the technological differences aren't automatically surprising, but we still want to understand why these particular differences arose.
Maybe the Tasmanians didn't have access to the same things or didn't need them. No dogs would mean no domesticated dogs. Different fishing conditions might make a net less useful than another method. A lack of suitable stone might matter for polished tools. Those are possibilities to investigate, not facts the passage gives us.
What we’re looking for
This is an EXCEPT question: four choices contribute to an explanation, and one does not. An answer needn't account for every item on the list. Explaining why one group lacked fishing nets, for example, could still help explain part of the difference. As we read, ask how each fact helps explain why the Australians had a technology that the Tasmanians lacked.
Working the answers
- A
This helps. The Tasmanians once used some of the same practices and technologies, then abandoned them after the separation. That gives a straightforward path from an earlier shared culture to a later difference. We might still ask why they abandoned those practices, but we no longer have to wonder how something once shared could be absent later.
- BCorrect
The Tasmanians developed these devices before the land bridge disappeared. But why, then, did they lack them two thousand years after the separation? B doesn't answer that question. If anything, it leaves us needing an account of how technologies they had already developed disappeared from use. Being old doesn't by itself explain being absent.
- C
This supplies a different route to the difference: the Australians received the technologies from Polynesian explorers after the land connection was gone. The Australians wouldn't have needed to invent them, and the Tasmanians wouldn't automatically have received them merely because the two peoples were related. The later arrival in Australia helps explain the unequal access, even though C doesn't settle every possible route of contact.
- D
Now the Australians developed the hunting tools after the groups were separated. The Tasmanians could not have brought those tools across the land bridge earlier because the tools didn't exist yet. That timing helps explain why Australians later had them while Tasmanians did not.
- E
Even before the bridge disappeared, being connected by land didn't mean every group had contact with every other group. E puts the innovations in northern Australia, among people the Tasmanians had not encountered. So the technologies could have existed before the separation without ever becoming part of the Tasmanians' practices. That helps explain the later difference.
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