PrepTest 118, Section 3, Question 16
Numerous paintings and engravings representing warfare can be(50 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(7 more words not shown)
- APaintings and engravings(11 more words not shown)
- BWarfare in the(11 more words not shown)
- CThere was no(15 more words not shown)
- DWarfare is the(8 more words not shown)
- EPaintings and engravings(17 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
No pictures of war doesn't necessarily mean no war. Maybe people fought before they started painting battles. Maybe earlier pictures existed but didn't survive.
The evidence concerns what archaeologists have found: depictions of warfare going back to the Neolithic period, when agriculture developed, but none from before then. The conclusion gives us a much bigger story. Warfare supposedly began because society became agricultural. Before getting to that cause, we need to know whether warfare actually began then. The absence of earlier pictures hasn't settled that.
What we’re looking for
For the required-assumption question, I'd look for the connection between the beginning of warfare and the beginning of its depiction. The author can't allow fighting to have already existed before people started representing it. That would undermine using the first representations to date the arrival of warfare.
Working the answers
- A
Paintings and engravings needn't have been the dominant art forms. People could have mostly sung songs or recited poetry while also making the depictions discussed here. Ranking forms of artistic expression doesn't connect the first surviving depictions with the beginning of warfare.
- B
Every war needn't have been a territorial dispute over farmland. Even if the transition to agriculture helped bring warfare into existence, later conflicts could have had other motives. B requires a particular motivation for all Neolithic warfare, while the argument concerns its origin. That is more than the argument needs.
- CCorrect
This rules out warfare existing before the period in which people first created paintings and engravings of it. That's the gap in treating the appearance of depictions as evidence of the appearance of warfare itself.
If people had fought earlier without representing those fights, the author's timing inference would fail. C excludes that possibility. It doesn't mean every individual battle had to be painted, and it doesn't by itself prove that agriculture caused warfare. It supplies a required part of this reasoning, not every missing piece.
- D
The argument makes a claim about how warfare developed in human history. It doesn't need the sweeping rule that any development of civilization inevitably brings warfare. A society could develop peacefully without disproving this particular account of warfare's origin elsewhere. D makes the claim much broader than necessary.
- E
The passage dates agriculture itself, not the first pictures of farming. Artists could begin portraying agricultural life earlier or later than warfare without changing the author's attempted connection between agriculture and the start of war. These two kinds of pictures don't have to appear together.
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