PrepTest 108, Section 4, Question 25

What we’re looking for

Working the answers

• A

  Researchers draw a conclusion and later evidence corrects it. But the conclusion concerns how long people occupied a site. We don't get the specific leap from similarity between recent examples to assumptions about much earlier ones.

• B
  Correct

  The late paintings are like modern humans; the similar paintings from a few years earlier are like the first-discovered, relatively recent ancestors. The leap comes when the historians assume the artist's very first paintings had the same style, even though those paintings haven't been recovered. That matches projecting familiar traits further backward.

• C

  The new manuscript changes an estimate of age. Our anthropologists weren't simply revising the dates of the fossils; they were making assumptions about lifestyles based on resemblance.

• D

  This gives us a resemblance between old and newer pottery, which is part of the pattern. But it stops there. Nobody uses that resemblance to infer what still earlier pottery must have looked like.

• E

  Looking for similar features in another fossil doesn't reproduce the backward leap. The botanists aren't assuming that a much earlier, unexamined plant must share the traits of two more recent examples.