PrepTest 116, Section 3, Question 7
Very little is known about prehistoric hominid cave(53 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(10 more words not shown)
- AThe primary source(12 more words not shown)
- BThe most important(12 more words not shown)
- CIf direct evidence(16 more words not shown)
- DIf there is(14 more words not shown)
- EThe frequency with(17 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Similar broken bones might come from similar activities. But could something else have caused the same injuries?
The cave dwellers' fractures resemble the type and distribution of fractures found in rodeo riders. I can see why that makes the animal-chasing explanation worth considering. Still, we haven't been told that chasing and tackling animals is the only way to end up with those injuries. Another activity might leave a similar pattern.
What we’re looking for
We're asked for a principle that helps justify the reasoning. I'd be looking for something connecting the injury pattern to the activity that caused it. For example, showing that these fractures couldn't have come from an unrelated activity would help. We don't need background knowledge about prehistoric life; we need a reason to move from similar injuries to similar causes.
Working the answers
- A
Skeletons could be our main source of information and still leave this particular inference uncertain. Knowing where our clues come from doesn't tell us which activity produced a fracture. The question is whether this pattern supports chasing and tackling animals, not whether skeletons are generally useful to researchers.
- B
How important it is to study food gathering doesn't establish how these cave dwellers behaved. A research topic can be important even when a proposed answer is poorly supported. We need help connecting the injuries to an activity, not a judgment about which questions researchers should prioritize.
- C
This tells researchers what evidence not to seek if direct evidence is available. It doesn't establish what caused these fractures, and the argument isn't recommending how to conduct a future investigation. A rule about whether to keep looking for evidence doesn't supply the connection missing from the evidence already presented.
- DCorrect
The effects are the two groups' similar fracture patterns. The causes are the activities that produced those fractures. If similar effects probably have similar causes, then the similarity to rodeo injuries supports the idea that the cave dwellers were doing similar things: chasing and tackling animals.
This is less absolute than my example of ruling out every other activity. That's fine. The argument says the activity is likely, and the task asks us to strengthen it. A principle making a similar cause more probable helps without proving that no other cause is possible.
- E
How often an activity happens is different from which activity happened. A relationship between injury frequency and activity frequency might help estimate how often people did something once we knew what caused their injuries. It doesn't tell us whether these fractures came from chasing animals in the first place.
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