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Due to an easing of state sanctions against hunting, Deersdale Preserve has experienced an influx of hunters in the last several months. During this time, the silvertail fox, a popular target for hunters, has seen a marked decrease in population. Therefore, to prevent the population of silvertail fox-an important apex predator responsible for keeping the Deersdale County`s rabbit population in check-from falling even lower, the state should once again place strict sanctions against hunting.
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Which of the following, if true, may suggest that stricter sanctions against hunting would not have the desired effect?
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Pediatrician: Child psychologists recommend that mothers of one-year olds not only name objects in the immediate environment, but that they include the color of the object, when applicable. For instance, if a mother hands her child a red ball, she should say,"This is a red ball."Nonetheless, even if mothers began to name the color, instead of simply saying,"This is a ball,"no real benefit will be conferred to the child, because studies have shown that children under 18-months old do not grasp the notion of color.
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The pediatrician's argument is most vulnerable to which of the following?
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The Canadian elk has traditionally been limited in its geographic range by the presence of elderberries, its primary source of food, which only grow up until a certain point in the tundra. A recent rise in temperatures, however, has seen a spread in the growth of elderberries northwards into the tundra. Therefore, the overall range of the Canadian elk can be expected to increase.
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Which of the following, if true, best casts doubt on the argument?
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In the last few years, a drastic spike in sea temperatures around Prudhoe Bay has caused the eggs of snow crabs to hatch earlier in the year than they had previously. As a result, baby snow crabs are more likely to be caught by deep sea fishing boats, since deep sea fishing boats are more numerous in Arctic waters during the fall season than they are during the winter season.
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Which of the following pieces of information is necessary to evaluate the argument?
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In a freshman biochemistry class at Newton University, the teacher assigns the class only `A`s,`B`s`or`C`s.The average on the semester final for the class of 2012 was five points lower than that of the class of 2011. Therefore, the percent of students who received`C`s was greater in 2012 than in 2011.
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Which of the following, if true, suggests the conclusion above is not necessarily valid?
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Nutritionist: Multivitamins are potent storehouses of antioxidants, substances that fight the oxidation process, which breaks down the body. Nonetheless, according to longitudinal studies-studies that follow subjects over the course of many years-those who take multivitamins every day have a decreased longevity. Clearly, if people want to live longer they should avoid antioxidants.
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Which of the following is an assumption the argument relies on?
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Language acquisition has long been thought of as a process of imitation and reinforcement. Children learn to speak, in the popular view, by copying the utterances heard around them, and by having their response strengthened by the repetitions, corrections, and other reactions that adults provide. In recent years, it has become clear that this principle will not explain all the facts of language development. Children do imitate a great deal, especially in learning sounds and vocabulary; but little of their grammatical ability can be explained in this way. Two kinds of evidence are commonly used in support of this criticism – one based on the kind of language children produce, the other on what they do not produce.
The first piece of evidence derives from the way children handle irregular grammatical patterns. When they encounter such irregular past-tense forms as went and took or such plural forms as mice and sheep, there is a stage when they replace these by forms based on the regular patterns of the language. They say such things as wented, taked, mices, mouses, and sheeps. Evidently, children assume that grammatical usage is regular, and try to work out for themselves what the forms `ought` to be – a reasoning process known as analogy. They could not have learned these forms by a process of imitation. The other kind of evidence is based on the way children seem unable to imitate adult grammatical constructions exactly, even when invited to do so.
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According to the passage, children cannot learn from a process of imitation alone for which of the following reasons?
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The idea that all mental functions are derived from the brain originated with Hippocrates, but it was largely neglected until the late 18th century, when Franz Gall attempted to link psychology and brain science. Gall took advantage of what was already known about the cerebral cortex. He was aware that it was bilaterally symmetrical and subdivided into four lobes. However, he found that these four lobes were, by themselves, inadequate to account for the forty-odd distinct psychological functions that psychologists had characterized by 1790. As a result he began to analyze the heads of hundreds of musicians, actors, etc., relating certain bony elevations or depressions under the scalp to the predominant talent or defects of their owners. Based on his skull palpitation, Gall subdivided the cortex into roughly forty regions, each of which served as an organ for a specific mental function.
While Gall`s theory that all mental processes derive from the brain proved to be correct, his methods for localizing specific functions were deeply flawed because they were not based on what we would now consider valid evidence. Gall did not test his ideas empirically by performing autopsies on the brains of patients and correlating damage to specific regions with defects in mental attributes; he distrusted the diseased brain and did not think it could reveal anything about normal behavior. Instead, he developed the notion that as each mental function is used, the particular area of the brain responsible for that function becomes enlarged. Eventually, a given area may become so bulky that it pushes out against the skull and produces a bump on the head.
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Which of the following is NOT an assumption that Gall makes regarding the relation between a person`s aptitude and personality traits, and that person`s brain?
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The historical basis for the King Arthur legend has long been debated by scholars. One school of thought, citing entries in the History of the Britons and Welsh Annals, sees Arthur as a genuine historical figure, a Romano-British leader who fought against the invading Anglo-Saxons sometime in the late 5th to early 6th century. The other text that seems to support the case for Arthur's historical existence is the 10th-centuryAnnales Cambriae. The latest research shows that theAnnales Cambriae?was based on a chronicle begun in the late 8th century in Wales. Additionally, the complex textual history of the?Annales Cambriae?precludes any certainty that the Arthurian annals were added to it even that early. They were more likely added at some point in the 10th century and may never have existed in any earlier set of annals.
This lack of convincing early evidence is the reason many recent historians exclude Arthur from their accounts of post-Roman Britain. In the view of historian Thomas Charles-Edwards there may well have been an historical Arthur, but that a historian can as yet say nothing of value about him. These modern admissions of ignorance are a relatively recent trend; earlier generations of historians were less skeptical. Historian John Morris made the putative reign of Arthur the organizing principle of his history of post-Roman Britain and Ireland. Even so, he found little to say about a historical Arthur. Partly in reaction to such theories, another school of thought emerged which argued that Arthur had no historical existence at all. Morris's Age of Arthur prompted archaeologist Nowell Myres to observe that no figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian's time. Arthur is not mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or named in any surviving manuscript written between 400 and 820. He is absent from Bede's early-8th-century Ecclesiastical History of the English People, another major early source for post-Roman history.
Some scholars argue that Arthur was originally a fictional hero of folklore - or even a half-forgotten Celtic deity - who became credited with real deeds in the distant past. They cite parallels with figures such as the Kentish totemic horse-gods Hengest and Horsa, who later became historicized. Bede ascribed to these legendary figures a historical role in the 5th-century Anglo-Saxon conquest of eastern Britain.
Historical documents for the post-Roman period are scarce. Of the many post-Roman archeological sites and places, only a handful have been identified as "Arthurian", and these date from the 12th century or later. Archaeology can confidently reveal names only through inscriptions found in reliably dated sites. In the absence of new compelling information about post-Roman England, a definitive answer to the question of Arthur's historical existence is unlikely.
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Which of the following best parallels the relationship between Charles-Edwards's and John Morris's interpretations regarding the existence of King Arthur?
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Montaigne`s pursuit of the character he called Myself-"bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful;?prating, silent;?laborious, delicate; knowing, ignorant"-lasted for twenty years and produced more than a thousand pages of observation and revision. When he died, he was still revising and, apparently, not at all surprised, since Myself was a?protean?creature, impossible to anticipate but also, being always at hand, impossible to ignore.
I like to think of the essays as a kind of thriller; with Myself, the elusive prey, and Montaigne, the sleuth, locked in a battle of equals who were too close for dissimulation and too smart for satisfaction. And it may be that Montaigne did, too, because he often warned his readers that nothing he wrote about Myself was likely to apply for much longer than it took the ink he used, writing it, to dry.
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As used in the passage, the word "dissimulation" connotes a sense of
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