PrepTest 110, Section 2, Question 8
Conservationist: The risk to airplane passengers from collisions(107 more words not shown)
The pilot counters the conservationist(1 more words not shown)
- Aattempting to show(9 more words not shown)
- Bquestioning the conservationist's(6 more words not shown)
- Casserting that dangerous(10 more words not shown)
- Ddiscrediting the moral(8 more words not shown)
- Edisputing the accuracy(7 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Only twenty damaged planes? Calling that number small doesn't, by itself, establish that the refuge is safe.
I also want to keep the claim about passengers separate from the final claim about safety. No passenger has been injured, but what about pilots or others? We aren't told anything happened to them; the point is that the passenger statistic doesn't cover every possible safety concern. Even for passengers, a record without injuries isn't a guarantee about the next collision.
The pilot develops a different, more specific concern. Seventeen of the twenty collisions happened in the last two years, and the bird population is growing rapidly. Now the total over ten years looks less reassuring. The problem appears to be increasing, and the pilot connects more collisions with a greater chance that at least one will injure a passenger.
What we’re looking for
We're asked how the pilot responds. I'd describe the move as adding an important consideration: the recent increase that the ten-year total doesn't reveal. Keep that separate from my earlier questions about other people at risk. The pilot's own response focuses on the trend and what it means for future passenger injuries.
Working the answers
- ACorrect
The ten-year description leaves out how concentrated the collisions are in the most recent years. Seventeen occurred in two years, leaving only three in the earlier eight. A total that sounds reassuring when spread across a decade can look quite different once we see that pattern.
That is how the additional information shows the description to be misleading. The pilot doesn't need to say the total is false. The point is that the selected facts give an incomplete picture of the developing risk.
- B
The pilot doesn't accuse the conservationist of having a bad motive. We aren't told the conservationist is protecting a sponsor or deliberately hiding something. The response adds facts about timing and bird numbers, then explains why those facts matter.
- C
The pilot doesn't say every dangerous situation inevitably grows more dangerous merely because time passes. This argument identifies a particular change: more birds and more collisions. It predicts a greater chance of injury from that change, not from a universal rule about the passage of time.
- D
There is no moral principle for the pilot to discredit. The conservationist argues from collision and injury figures to a claim about safety. The pilot questions that assessment using additional facts, not a competing view of what people ought to value.
- E
The pilot accepts the twenty collisions and specifies when seventeen of them occurred. Saying the total is wrong would be a different response. Here, the figures can be accurate while the way they are presented obscures the trend. That distinction is why A fits and E doesn't.
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