PrepTest 155, Section 4, Question 22
The universe as a whole necessarily tends toward(29 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(11 more words not shown)
- AWooded Lake is(39 more words not shown)
- BThis has been(26 more words not shown)
- CThe manifest indicates(43 more words not shown)
- DAlthough Hopper claims(50 more words not shown)
- ETwo of the(34 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
The universe can become more disordered overall while something within it becomes more orderly. At first, I might think of people organizing a community and want to object to the premise. But the premise concerns the universe as a whole, including everything far beyond that community. Local organization wouldn't by itself disprove an overall trend toward disorder.
The author then makes that very mistake in the other direction: because the universe as a whole tends toward disorder, Earth's biosphere must always be doing so too. Earth is part of the universe, but the whole's trend doesn't automatically describe each part. A change elsewhere could outweigh a different change here.
Try a simpler parallel. Suppose a country gets a great deal of snow in a particular winter. Does that mean a particular town in the country gets a great deal of snow? No. The country's overall description could be driven by snowy areas while that town stays dry.
What we’re looking for
That's what we're looking for: a claim about a whole transferred to one of its parts without enough support. The subject matter can change completely, and the conclusion may appear before the evidence. Keep the direction of the transfer in view.
Working the answers
- ACorrect
The lake system plays the role of the universe. Wooded Lake plays the role of Earth's biosphere, a part within the larger whole. The system is exceptionally beautiful, so the argument concludes that Wooded Lake must be exceptionally beautiful too.
But perhaps Wooded Lake has murky water, unattractive rocks, and rotting debris, while the other lakes make the interconnected system spectacular. The part could lack the feature attributed to the whole. That's the same unsupported transfer as the original.
Notice the order: A gives the claim about Wooded Lake first, then says it follows from the system's beauty. The presentation order changed, but the reasoning still runs from whole to part.
- B
This may look close because a month contains individual days. But the conclusion is a probability claim about a day in an unusually cold month. The original claims that the biosphere necessarily follows the whole's trend and has always done so. B doesn't simply insist that every day must share the month's overall description. We don't have to treat B as a perfect statistical argument to recognize that A reproduces the specific mistake much more closely.
- C
The evidence already says that every deck contains some commercial cargo. It doesn't start with a property of the ship as a whole and infer that each deck shares it. If 'devoted to' means exclusively used for cargo, the conclusion may overstate what having some cargo establishes, but that is a different issue. A matching argument would instead say, 'This is a cargo ship, so every deck must be a cargo deck.' C doesn't reason that way.
- D
The records explicitly describe every member of the cleanup crew, and Hopper is a member. Applying an every-member statement to Hopper is different from transferring a collective property of the crew to him. The question isn't whether a crew as a whole occupied a location; the evidence assigns the location to each person. This lacks the original's whole-to-part leap.
- E
This moves from two individual parts to the safety of the assembly as a whole. Our argument moves from the whole universe to one part of it. The direction is reversed. Whether unsafe critical parts warrant repairing the assembly is a separate question; it doesn't give us the same transfer from a whole to one of its components.
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