After an oil spill, rehabilitation centers were set up to save sea otters by removing oil from them. The effort was ...

shunhe on July 24, 2020

Hi @melissahamilton316,

Thanks for the question! So we’re being asked here to find a potential challenge that most seriously calls into question evidence offered in support of the conclusion above; in other words, we’re being asked to weaken the argument, so this is a Weaken question. This one is a bit special, because we’re being asked to directly attack the evidence itself, instead of the logic getting us from the evidence to the conclusion. So we’re going to have to find an answer choice that casts doubt on some of the evidence provided here, since again, we’re asked to “call into question evidence offered in support of the conclusion above” as opposed to “weaken the argument above” or something like that.

So now let’s take a look at (C), which asks if the process of capturing sea otters unavoidably involved trapping and releasing some otters not affected by the spill. How does this cast doubt on the evidence used in this argument? The argument is about the otters that were affected by the spill, so we don’t care about the otters that aren’t affected by the spill. Since (C) doesn’t damage any of the evidence, it can’t be the right answer.

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

Mansi-Arora on January 29, 2021

this really helped, thank you!