Letter to the editor: Your article was unjustified in criticizing environmentalists for claiming that more wolves on ...

shunhe on August 25, 2020

Hi @mosie,

Thanks for the question! So we’re being asked for the conclusion here. What are all the statements working up towards? We’re told that this article is unjustified in criticizing environmentalists for making some claim. Why? Because of all the other sentences that follow. Everything else supports that first sentence. The structure of the argument is basically:

Premise: The environmentalists claimed that more wolves on Vancouver Island are killed than are born
Premise: You said that this was disproven by some studies
Premise: But you failed to account for some fact
Conclusion: Your article was unjustified in its criticisms of the environmentalists

Do you see how everything works together to support that conclusion? That’s why (E) is the correct answer, since it’s a paraphrase of the first sentence. (D) is wrong because the letter writer doesn’t say that the statistic itself is incorrect, the author is saying that something else also needs to be taken into consideration with that statistic.

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