Measurements of the extent of amino-acid decomposition in fragments of eggshell found at archaeological sites in such...
abbylienJune 16, 2020
Why is C supported by the passage?
I immediately ruled out C because often in the course things are ruled out with "we have no idea about ..." and I felt in this answer we have no idea about what happens with temperature fluctuations from the passage. It doesn't mention it at all, so how can that be 100% supported? It seems to me, you have to make a large inference, and must be true questions dont require that. Should I change this strategy when reading answer choices?
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Thanks for the question! So for a lot of must be true questions, the answer will be 100% supported, but sometimes, you’ll get a must be true question where none of the answer choices seem 100% supported by the passage. This is one of those, and when this happens, you have to pick the one that is the most supported; in other words, the best answer. I don’t think it’s a huge inference you have to make here, and (C) is certainly more supported than the rest of the answer choices in this question.
Recall what we’re told. Decomposition can be used to obtain accurate dates for sites up to 200k years old in (warmer) climates like South Africa’s, whereas in cool climates, it can be almost a million years. In other words, we’re given a connection between temperature and the effectiveness of this technique. So it’s not a huge, huge leap to think that if there’s a lot of unsuspected climactic fluctuations (from cool climate to warm climate to cool climate) and we don’t expect them (and so can’t factor them into our calculations), our results will probably be less accurate. One silly example: maybe a place was a cool climate up until 10 years ago, and then it became a warm climate, and we had no clue it changed. Well, then we think it’s a cool climate, when really, it was a warm climate for the most part. So that might mess up the results of our tests if the eggshell is over 200,000 years old. And also, notice that in this answer choice, the words “less likely” are used. Not “the test will yield inaccurate results,” but “the test is less likely to yield accurate results.” Wishy-washy sentences like this are more likely to be supported in general in must be true questions.
Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.
