PrepTest 148, Section 4, Question 26

What we’re looking for

Working the answers

• A

  Using military conquest as evidence of Alexander's greatness doesn't mean the author thinks conquest is the only route to greatness. An artist or another kind of leader could also be great. A turns one offered reason into an exclusive rule the argument doesn't need.

• B
  Correct

  This exposes another gap: the biggest tomb found so far needn't be the biggest tomb ever built. Even if we granted that Alexander had the largest one, perhaps his tomb hasn't been discovered. Perhaps it was destroyed, leaving this smaller tomb as the largest surviving find.

  That possibility fits the evidence without making the new discovery Alexander's tomb. My main objection concerned the leap from greatness to tomb size; B instead challenges the leap from the largest discovered tomb to the largest tomb that existed. It's a separate, valid reason the conclusion doesn't follow.

• C

  The size of tombs found elsewhere doesn't establish who occupied this particular tomb in Macedonia. A larger tomb in another region could belong to somebody else, leaving this argument's identification problem unresolved. We don't need to assume Alexander could never have been buried elsewhere. The point is that comparing regional tomb sizes, by itself, doesn't supply or challenge the specific link used to identify this discovery.

• D

  The empire's collapse might matter to an assessment of Alexander's legacy, but it doesn't tell us whether this tomb belonged to him. Nor does it by itself show how large his tomb would have been. We shouldn't invent a story about when the tomb was built or what happened to it after the collapse. The unanswered identification problem is already clear without that speculation.

• E

  The passage presents the remains as the largest tomb found in the region. It gives us no particular reason to doubt that archaeologists can estimate and compare the tombs' sizes. The important error remains even if those measurements are completely accurate: largest among the discoveries doesn't establish largest among everything built, much less identify the person buried there.