Thanks for the question! Honestly, it also sums up my life very well (at least the “What does any of this mean?” and “What????”). And gave me a good throwback to the beginnings of my studies too. Let’s take this bit by bit, starting with the stimulus.
So we have M saying that it’s almost impossible to find a person between 85 and 90 years old who primarily uses their left hand. So sounds like left-handed people between 85-90 years old is a pretty rare phenomenon.
Then Q comes back and says that 70-90 years ago, children were punished for using their left hands to eat/write and had to use their right hands.
Are these two statements linked? Well, seems like those children from 70-90 years ago would probably be the 85-90 year olds now. So sounds like there’s a connection there.
The question’s now asking us to see how we can use what Q says to counter M if M claims to do one of the following answer choices. So what could Q be providing an alternative explanation for? Well, imagine M says that “right-handed people must just live longer because of genetics” or something like that. That’s a reasonable hypothesis to make based on the evidence that M says. But what Q says counters that, right? Because Q is basically saying it’s not that there are way fewer left-handed people who made it to old age, it’s just that they all got forced to be right-handed when they were kids. So Q would counter M if M says that it’s some survival advantage of being right-handed that lets those old people be primarily right handed. And that’s what (A) tells us: that if M tried to support the hypothesis that being born right-handed confers a survival advantage, what Q says would counter that by providing an alternative explanation.
Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.
andreaskormusisAugust 22, 2020
So in the question I'm supposed to figure out what that response from Q would make sense towards? Like i guess i can see it because the rest all work, but that one is so far from the question that i would never understand it. Is this one of those bizzaro formats?
