PrepTest 124, Section 3, Question 6
Ornithologist: This bird species is widely thought to(51 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the ornithologist's(12 more words not shown)
- Aassumes, without providing(18 more words not shown)
- Bfails to specify(16 more words not shown)
- Cadopts a widespread(15 more words not shown)
- Dneglects the possibility(17 more words not shown)
- Efails to consider(17 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
What do these birds eat after breakfast?
The ornithologist watched hundreds of birds for months. That sounds like a lot of evidence, but all of it came from the morning. We can accept that most of the food eaten during those observations was animal food without accepting that animal food makes up most of the birds' entire diet.
Imagine the birds eat just 10 percent of their daily food in the morning. Most of that small breakfast could be insects, followed by a much larger meal of vegetation in the evening. Their morning diet would fit the observations perfectly, while their overall diet would still be mostly vegetation.
What we’re looking for
That's the problem I'd expect the flaw answer to describe. Watching more birds on more mornings doesn't settle what they eat at other times. The ornithologist has used one part of the day to make a claim about their diet as a whole.
Working the answers
- A
An observer could sometimes affect an animal's behavior. But this observer is concealed in a well-camouflaged blind, which gives us a reason to think the birds aren't reacting to being watched. More importantly, our objection works even if the birds behave completely normally: their normal morning meal may differ from their normal evening meal.
- B
I don't care whether the other animal foods are rodents, worms, or something else. They are animal foods, which is the distinction the argument needs. Naming each one wouldn't tell us how much vegetation the birds eat later.
- C
The ornithologist rejects the widespread belief. The conclusion says that the belief about a mostly plant-based diet is erroneous. C describes adopting that belief, so it gets the argument's position backward.
- DCorrect
The birds might eat differently at different times of day and night. If breakfast is small and mostly insects, while dinner is large and mostly vegetation, the observations don't establish that the familiar belief is wrong. D identifies exactly what the morning-only observations leave open.
- E
A change in diet could explain why an earlier belief no longer describes the birds correctly. That would fit the ornithologist's claim about their present diet, rather than expose the gap in the evidence for it. We still need to ask whether the current morning observations represent their overall current diet.
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