PrepTest 131, Section 3, Question 8
The more modern archaeologists learn about Mayan civilization,(56 more words not shown)
The argument's reasoning is most(9 more words not shown)
- Afails to provide(8 more words not shown)
- Bbases a generalization(9 more words not shown)
- Coverlooks the impressive(5 more words not shown)
- Drelies on two(6 more words not shown)
- Etakes a mere(8 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
The astronomers made scientific observations and predictions. The religious scribes understood sophisticated mathematics. Those sound like intellectual achievements. But do they show that the Mayan people generally had that mathematical knowledge?
Think about a similar claim today: American mathematicians with doctorates can do advanced calculus, so Americans in general must be good at advanced calculus. That doesn't follow. Someone can live in the same society as those specialists without sharing their expertise.
What we’re looking for
The same concern applies to the religious scribes. Their writings tell us about their mathematical competence. The scribes might have received years of specialized education while an ordinary farmer had little opportunity to study mathematics. Why assume this particular group represents the population? The flaw question asks us to describe that move from evidence about a special group to a claim about people generally.
Working the answers
- A
We can understand the claimed achievements well enough: scientific work and sophisticated mathematics. Defining “intellectual achievement” more precisely would not tell us whether the scribes represent the wider population. The reasoning fails at that generalization, not because the term has been left unusably vague.
- BCorrect
The sample is the religious scribes whose writings display mathematical competence. The generalization concerns the Mayan people as a whole. Scribes could have specialized knowledge that other members of their society lacked, just as mathematicians' abilities don't establish the average person's abilities. The argument gives no basis for treating this group as representative.
- C
Other civilizations could have impressive achievements too. That would not determine how widely mathematical knowledge was shared within Mayan civilization. The argument isn't ranking civilizations or claiming that only the Maya achieved anything intellectually.
- D
There is no shift between two meanings of “scientific.” The problem is the change in the group being discussed, from religious scribes to people generally. A change of subject is not a change in the meaning of that term.
- E
The argument doesn't claim that one correlated event caused another. It uses evidence about the skills of one group to draw a conclusion about a larger population. That is a problem of representation, not an unsupported causal explanation.
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