PrepTest 151, Section 3, Question 16
Wood that is waterlogged or desiccated can be(80 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(8 more words not shown)
- AMost of the(24 more words not shown)
- BFew, if any,(20 more words not shown)
- CThe individuals who(18 more words not shown)
- DAn artifact will(26 more words not shown)
- EOf the early(23 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
What survived isn't necessarily everything people made.
Ordinary wood usually falls apart within a century or two, although being waterlogged or dried out can preserve it longer. The passage uses that decay to explain why archaeologists have so few early wheeled vehicles. The ceramic models lasted better, so researchers mainly study those instead.
I might wonder how accurately a model represents a real vehicle. Imagine a toy rocket made before anyone had built a working version: the model alone wouldn't prove the full-sized object existed. But this question asks what the passage supports, and the passage's main explanation concerns different materials surviving at different rates.
What we’re looking for
My first inference would therefore concern the missing vehicles. The text points to wood deteriorating under ordinary conditions as the reason so many aren't available. We should look for an answer connecting the losses to wood rather than to materials as durable as the surviving ceramic models. That doesn't require every wooden object to disappear or every ceramic object to be found.
Working the answers
- A
The passage doesn't identify the makers of either the models or the vehicles. A model could have been made by a vehicle builder, by someone copying a vehicle, or by someone else. Their existing at roughly the same time doesn't establish that the same individuals made them.
- B
Wooden models might have existed and then disintegrated. The passage explains why ceramic objects are more likely to remain available, so the surviving sample cannot establish that very few fragile models were originally made. B repeats the mistake of treating what survives as a complete inventory of what existed.
- C
The builders could have known about preservation and still used ordinary wood. Perhaps a vehicle lasting many years was enough for their purposes; preserving it for future archaeologists needn't have been their goal. The passage describes what materials endure, not what the builders knew.
- D
Preservation and ease of discovery are different issues. An object can survive while remaining hard to locate, but we aren't given a comparison of how difficult it is to find objects preserved under different conditions. The evidence concerns why some remains disintegrated.
- ECorrect
The passage explains the shortage of surviving vehicles by pointing to wood's tendency to decay. It contrasts those losses with the survival of much more durable ceramic models. That supports wood being more common among the lost vehicles than materials at least as resistant to disintegration as ceramic.
Keep the group straight: E concerns the vehicles that were not preserved. It doesn't say every early vehicle was wooden, or that no wooden vehicle survived. It draws the material comparison suggested by the passage's explanation of what has been lost.
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