PrepTest 109, Section 1, Question 20
Recently discovered prehistoric rock paintings on small islands(75 more words not shown)
Each of the following, if(13 more words not shown)
- AOnce on these(9 more words not shown)
- BParts of the(10 more words not shown)
- CThe cave paintings(10 more words not shown)
- DThose who did(16 more words not shown)
- EThe cave paintings(19 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Who said the painters had to make that journey? Maybe they lived on the islands.
The author rejects the diet theory because the painters supposedly needed to eat sea animals while traveling, yet the surviving pictures don't clearly show those animals. But island residents might have been eating food available on land. And even if the painters traveled, their diet while painting on the islands needn't be identical to their diet on the way there. The theory concerns their current diets, not a record of every meal they had ever eaten.
I'd also pause at “unambiguously.” A picture that doesn't clearly look like a fish might still be an attempt to paint one. If my drawing were bad enough, the failure to recognize it wouldn't show I had intended to paint something else. There are several ways the missing sea-animal pictures might fail to disprove the diet theory.
What we’re looking for
The question adds an EXCEPT: four answers weaken the author's attack on that theory. We need the answer that doesn't. It could support the attack, but it could also simply leave the attack untouched. I'll ask how each choice affects the claimed mismatch between what the painters ate and what they painted.
Working the answers
- A
This weakens the attack by telling us what the painters ate once they were on the islands: land animals. The paintings could largely depict that current diet even if the painters had eaten sea animals during the journey.
We don't have to pretend A proves they never ate fish. Its point is that the author's focus on travel food needn't tell us what their diet was when they were making the paintings. That gives us a reason the missing sea animals might not defeat the theory.
- B
If parts of the paintings disappeared, the surviving images may not show everything the painters originally depicted. The lost portions could have included sea animals. That possibility weakens the inference from “we don't see clear sea animals now” to “the painters didn't depict what they ate.”
B doesn't establish that the missing images were sea animals. It doesn't need to prove the diet theory correct. It gives a reason the surviving evidence might be incomplete, which makes the author's rejection less secure.
- CCorrect
Pictures of land animals don't tell us that the painters ate those animals. We can't assume the very diet theory under dispute in order to make that connection.
Compare A: it gives us information about the painters' actual food on the islands. C only gives us information about what appears in the pictures. If we still accept the author's claim that sea animals were a necessary part of their diet, adding land animals to the pictures doesn't explain why clear sea animals are absent.
That is why C doesn't weaken the attack. It can look helpful if we silently add, “And those land animals were what the painters ate.” But the answer doesn't say that. The distinction between a pictured animal and an eaten animal does the work here.
- D
Preserved meat provides a possible food supply for the journey. Picture travelers bringing something like dried meat instead of relying on sea animals along the way. We don't have to establish exactly what they packed to see the problem for the author: advanced preservation makes the claimed need to eat sea animals less convincing. That weakens the attack.
- E
This matches the possibility we raised at the start. The painters were island inhabitants, and we are expressly told they ate land animals. The author can't simply treat them as visitors who had to make a long sea journey to reach their painting site. Their stated land-animal diet gives the theory room to survive without clear pictures of sea animals.
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