PrepTest 139, Section 4, Question 9
Archaeologists are currently analyzing plant remains found at(70 more words not shown)
The statements above, if true,(8 more words not shown)
- AThe archaeologists analyzing(19 more words not shown)
- BThe people who(16 more words not shown)
- CIf the people(32 more words not shown)
- DIf the people(29 more words not shown)
- EIt is more(37 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Either way, these people did something unusual with plants.
The remains might come from cultivated plants, or they might come from wild plants. The passage tells us what each possibility would mean. Cultivation would put this group's discovery of agriculture thousands of years before the earliest otherwise known discovery. Wild plants would mean a diet with a wider variety of them than any other group's at the time.
What we’re looking for
We don't have to settle which possibility is true to get an inference. Both routes point to distinctive plant use: unusually early farming or an unusually varied wild-plant diet. That's my prediction for what the statements most strongly support. We can identify what the alternatives share without pretending we already know which one the archaeologists will establish.
Working the answers
- A
Knowing what a finding would mean is different from knowing that scientists can make the finding. The remains could be too poorly preserved to settle whether the plants were cultivated. The passage gives the consequences of each possibility, not a guarantee that the analysis will resolve them.
- BCorrect
On either account, the group used plants in a way that set it apart at the time: cultivating them unusually early or eating an unusually wide range of wild plants. B captures that shared implication without choosing between the two explanations.
- C
An advanced use of wild plants doesn't establish that these particular remains were uncultivated. A group could make sophisticated use of wild plants and also grow crops. More importantly, the passage doesn't give us a rule connecting “more advanced” wild-plant use with the status of the remains. C asks us to draw a conclusion in a direction the evidence hasn't supplied.
- D
The passage says cultivated remains would establish early agriculture. It doesn't say early agriculture guarantees cultivated remains at this site. A group could have farmed without leaving surviving cultivated plants in the material these archaeologists found. D turns a way of establishing early agriculture into something early agriculture must leave behind.
- E
We aren't given relative probabilities. Either finding would be striking, but being striking doesn't make one more likely than the other. The passage explains what each alternative would show; it doesn't rank their chances.
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