PrepTest 119, Section 1, Question 17
The pronghorn, an antelope-like mammal that lives on(465 more words not shown)
Based on the passage, the(20 more words not shown)
- Abehavior that persists(11 more words not shown)
- Bthe original organism(9 more words not shown)
- Cthe pronghorn's ability(9 more words not shown)
- Dthe environmental conditions(11 more words not shown)
- Ean original behavior(13 more words not shown)
Reading the passage
What's missing from the situation we want to test? The old predators. We still have fast pronghorns, but we can't observe them interacting with the extinct American cheetahs or long-legged hyenas. That's my prediction for the extinct “principal component.” The answer may describe it more broadly than naming those predators.
Working the answers
- A
This describes the behavior that remains. The missing component is what originally caused that behavior to develop, not the behavior itself.
- B
This would be the ancestral pronghorn. But the discussion concerns the disappearance of the environmental pressure that would explain its descendants' behavior—the old predators.
- C
This ability hasn't disappeared. It's the present-day fact we're trying to explain.
- DCorrect
The predators were part of the environmental conditions to which pronghorns supposedly adapted. Those conditions are gone, which makes it difficult to test their role in producing the behavior. D states our predator prediction in more general terms.
- E
This points to an earlier behavior that has been modified. The explanation instead concerns a behavior persisting after the conditions that favored it disappeared. The extinct component is the cause in the environment, not an earlier version of the behavior.
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