PrepTest 148, Section 3, Question 20
Agricultural scientist: Wild apples are considerably smaller than(69 more words not shown)
The agricultural scientist's argument is(10 more words not shown)
- Afails to consider(27 more words not shown)
- Bfails to consider(31 more words not shown)
- Ctakes for granted(21 more words not shown)
- Demploys a premise(11 more words not shown)
- Euses a claim(16 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Maybe they were growing apples that hadn't gotten big yet.
Imagine people beginning with small apples and planting seeds from the larger ones. Repeating that selection over many generations could eventually produce much larger fruit. At the beginning, though, the apples they grew might still look like the wild apples they started with. Cultivation wouldn't have to transform their size immediately.
What we’re looking for
The scientist uses today's supermarket apples as the comparison for apples from the beginning of fruit cultivation. But the size difference we see now might have developed during those thousands of years. For the flaw, I'd look for that overlooked change: early cultivated apples could have been small even though modern cultivated apples are large.
Working the answers
- A
Nearby regions aren't the subject of the conclusion. Apples could have been cultivated next door while not being cultivated in this particular region. That would fit the scientist's conclusion rather than expose why the local remains don't support it.
- BCorrect
Recently cultivated plants might still closely resemble their wild counterparts. That explains how the archaeologists could find small apples from a time when people were already cultivating them. The modern size contrast doesn't establish the same contrast at the very beginning. We don't have to prove that the ancient apples were cultivated; this possibility shows why their small size isn't enough to make the scientist's inference convincing.
- C
The scientist doesn't have to assume that intermediate sizes are impossible. There could be plenty of apples between the small wild ones and today's large supermarket ones. The problem would remain: the scientist treats the wild-sized remains as evidence against cultivation, without considering that early cultivated apples might have been that small too. C attacks a broader claim the argument doesn't need.
- D
'Incompatible' means the premise and conclusion can't both be true. But small apple remains could exist in a region where apples weren't cultivated. There's no contradiction between those claims. The problem is that small remains could also exist where apples were cultivated, so the evidence doesn't justify the inference as well as the scientist thinks.
- E
The size observations don't presuppose that apples weren't cultivated 5,000 years ago. We could measure both modern and ancient apples without first deciding that historical question. The scientist tries to use independent observations to support the conclusion; the mistake is assuming those measurements distinguish wild from cultivated apples across such a long period. That's an unsupported connection, not a conclusion being used to support itself.
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