All of John's friends say they know someone who has smoked 40 cigarettes a day for the past 40 years and yet who is r...
angelasargentSeptember 13, 2020
Still confused
On how (E) is correct. What’s truly confusing me is that it says that John is “quite certain” that he is not unique.... etc. to me “quite certain” means that there is doubt there, and that he cannot guarantee with the utmost certainty that he is not unique. Which is why I opted for the answer that stated his friends knew the some person who smoked.
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Thanks for the question! Let’s take a look at what the stimulus is telling us. We’re told that basically, we have this way of using amino-acid decomposition in eggshell fragments to date sites. We also know that these eggshells decompose more slowly in cool climates, and so the technique works accurately for up to a million years when we're measuring sites in cooler regions.
Now we’re asked for something that this information provides the most support for. (E) tells us that it supports the idea that fragments of eggshell are more likely to be found at ancient archaeological sites in warm regions of the world than at such sites in cooler regions. Is this a “must be true” based on what the stimulus tells us? So first of all, if the eggshells decompose more quickly in lower climates, one would generally think that there would be fewer of them and thus harder to find them, since more of them would have decomposed in the same time in the warmer places. Even in the best case scenario, there’s just no connection between the probability of finding eggshell fragments and the temperature, which means that (E) (which posits a relationship) isn’t supported by what we’re told, and therefore wrong.
Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.
shunheSeptember 14, 2020
Hi @angelasargent, sorry, that answer should've showed up on another post. You should understand John's being "quite certain" as John's being "certain" here. If there's some doubt, there's no correct answer to this question! It definitely doesn't have to be true that the smoker they know is the same person. They could definitely be different people; nothing in the stimulus precludes that, and so it can't be the right answer. Hope this helps!
angelasargentSeptember 15, 2020
Hi @shunhe, thank you for the response! No worries!
STACEYCOX43March 23, 2021
Thanks for the responses above. I applied the knowledge that we should take all info in the prompt as truth and not infer, so I'm puzzled as to why we speculated subjective like "they're lying" as the correct answer. I chose C, assuming (though I see I'm also speculating) the sample group had to be the same. This just seems like a poorly written question.
