PrepTest 153, Section 2, Question 2
Biologist: Some small animals will instinctively go limp,(39 more words not shown)
Which one of the following,(14 more words not shown)
- AMany small animal(13 more words not shown)
- BPredators often leave(11 more words not shown)
- CA small animal(20 more words not shown)
- DMost predators prey(13 more words not shown)
- EMany small animal(12 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Why play dead if the predator still plans to eat you?
My first thought is that appearing dead might make the predator suspicious. Perhaps it thinks, 'That animal died awfully quickly. Is something wrong with it?' If the predator then refused to eat an apparently sick animal, playing dead could help.
But the passage tells us the predator intends to eat it either way. We can't resolve this puzzle by simply erasing that fact. We need playing dead to help even when the predator still wants the meal.
What if the benefit is a chance to escape? An animal that seems unable to move might receive less attention. Imagine the predator lets its guard down because it thinks the little rabbit is dead. If the rabbit can get up and run while it isn't being watched, going limp has accomplished something without changing the predator's appetite.
What we’re looking for
That's what I'd look for in this resolve question: some way the response improves the animal's chance of surviving the encounter. The predator can intend to eat it and still fail to do so.
Working the answers
- A
A loud noise is another circumstance that triggers playing dead. That doesn't tell us what advantage the response gives an animal already caught by a predator. We would still have the same question: if the predator wants to eat it, how does lying limp help?
- BCorrect
Eating later is different from eating now. Suppose a predator treats the limp animal as a dead meal, puts it in a hiding place, and goes away. The predator intends to come back and eat it, so we haven't contradicted the biologist's premise. But the prey now has an opportunity to get up and leave.
B doesn't explicitly say, 'The animal escapes.' We have to connect the given habit of storing food with the apparent helplessness created by playing dead. That supplies a plausible survival benefit. We don't need every animal to escape every time; an opportunity to survive explains how the behavior could help.
- C
This makes the response more likely around a common predator species. It doesn't explain what happens after the animal goes limp. A response could be frequent without being useful, so the frequency doesn't resolve our question about survival value.
- D
A predator might eat many species and still eat each captured animal immediately. A varied diet tells us nothing about why playing dead would help one of those animals get away. The missing information is a consequence of the prey's behavior, not the range of the predator's menu.
- E
Fighting explains a possible defense for animals that don't play dead. Our question concerns the animals that do. Giving another group a successful strategy doesn't explain why this group's very different strategy could help.
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