In Peru, ancient disturbances in the dark surface material of a desert show up as light-colored lines that are the wi...

123 June 17, 2020

Confused

Wouldn’t the question stem mean.. how would you counter an objection? The premise is that the parallel lines are unrelated to the bird. So the objection to this would be that they do serve a purpose. And then to counter this would be to in fact show that the parallel lines are unrelated. wouldn’t (E) do this? It would counter the objection?

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shunhe June 18, 2020

Hi @JennaH,

Thanks for the question! So let’s take a look at the question here. We’re taking the perspective of someone who thinks the lines refer to astronomical phenomena. And we want to counter an objection: that the crossing of the straight-line pattern over the bird figure shows that the two kinds of line patterns served unrelated purposes. So to counter this, we actually want to show that the lines are somehow related, not that they’re unrelated.

So now you can likely see why (E) is wrong, since it seems more to suggest that the lines are unrelated. But in addition, even if that’s what you were trying to prove, you’d still want to look at the other answer choices before picking (E). Just because one thing is made well before another doesn’t mean that they’re not related at all. You could build one building based on something, and later build another building based on it, for example.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.