PrepTest 110, Section 1, Question 15
In the eighteenth century the French naturalist Jean(442 more words not shown)
The primary purpose of the(4 more words not shown)
- Asuggest a modification(3 more words not shown)
- Bdemonstrate the correctness(3 more words not shown)
- Cillustrate the significance(3 more words not shown)
- Dcriticize scientists' rejection(3 more words not shown)
- Eexplain how recent(5 more words not shown)
Reading the passage
The last paragraph brings us back to the point we predicted: these discoveries may support Lamarck's hypothesis. It organizes the findings into vertical and horizontal acquisition, then proposes horizontal transmission as the mechanism biologists had been unable to find.
What we’re looking for
However skeptical we are of that connection, our job is to identify the writer's conclusion and how this paragraph reaches it.
Working the answers
- A
The writer offers a possible mechanism supporting the hypothesis, not a modified version of the hypothesis.
- B
Demonstrate correctness goes further than “may eventually prove.” The paragraph leaves open a possibility; it doesn't claim the hypothesis has already been established.
- C
We aren't being shown why Lamarck's hypothesis is important or what we could accomplish with it. We are being shown how the recent evidence might support it. Those are different purposes.
- D
The missing mechanism helps explain scientists' earlier rejection, but the paragraph doesn't criticize them for rejecting the hypothesis. Its focus is what the new findings might establish.
- ECorrect
Horizontal transmission is the proposed link between the recent discoveries and inherited acquired characteristics. The final sentence says this mechanism may eventually establish Lamarck's hypothesis. This choice preserves that cautious conclusion.
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