|
In the argument, the two portions (the third and last sentences) play which of the following roles?
|
|
The element ytterbium increases its electrical resistance when subject to high mechanical stresses. This property has made it an indispensable component in a medical tool designed to measure the stress on bones, which can guide physicians in setting broken bones. Unfortunately, ytterbium is rare, found in only a few meager sources around the world. A steep market demand will cause the price to skyrocket, and this technology so helpful to physicians will become unaffordable.
|
|
Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the argument above?
|
|
Megalimpet is a nationwide owner of office space. ?They have major office buildings in the downtowns of several cities in the 48 lower states, and rent this space to individual companies. ?Megalimpet office spaces vary from small office to large suites, and every space has custom-designed wall-to-wall carpeting. ?The carpet in several Megalimpet facilities needed replacing. ?The winning bid for the nationwide carpet replacement was submitted by Bathyderm Carpet Company (BCC). ?The bid contract involves all delivery costs, all installation, and any ongoing maintenance and upkeep while the carpet is under the three-year warranty. ?Both BCC executives and independent consultants they hired felt BCC would be able to perform all these services for far less than their bid price; these circumstances would allow BCC to reap a considerable profit.
|
|
Which of the following, if true, most calls in question the argument that BCC will make a large profit from this contract with Megalimpet?
|
|
Self-pollinating plants carry several advantages over those plants that are non–self-pollinating. For one, self-pollinating plants still produce the same number of seeds during drought conditions, when the number of insects-which aid in the spread of seeds of non–self-pollinating plants-is low. Self-pollinating plants are also able to thrive in a greater variety of climates. Nonetheless, the number of self-pollinating plants in the world is much lower than that of non–self-pollinating plants.
|
|
Which of the following, if true, could account for the discrepancy described in the paragraph above?
|
|
In an effort to recruit the most qualified educators, New Way Education has begun to canvas for potential teachers in top-ranked universities throughout the country. Those students who show interest in becoming teachers are put through rigorous training that includes a final test, in which students must effectively teach a 15-minute mock classroom to a team of New Way Education trainers. Therefore, those who are selected to teach at New Way Education are some of the best educators in the industry and will create a positive learning experience for students in their classrooms.
|
|
Which of the following is an assumption on which the argument rests?
|
|
The rate of health complications of patients on intravenous (IV) therapy at a particular hospital were higher than usual. ?Government inspectors found that the typical IV solutions used in this hospital had somewhat high concentrations of sodium and potassium, which were raising patients' blood pressure and taxing their kidneys. ?The government inspectors mandated lowering the sodium and potassium in these IV preparations, and threatened with a possible government fine. ?In compliance, the hospital lowered the sodium and potassium levels in the IV solutions to the correct levels. ?Nevertheless, patients on IV therapy at that hospital continued to have a high rate of health complications.
|
|
Which of the following, if true, most helps to explain why acting on the government inspectors' recommendations failed to achieve its goal?
|
Freudianism sits alongside Marxism and Darwinism in the pantheon of modern theories held to be so revelatory that they not only gained the adherence of Western intelligentsia but shaped the broader culture. During the first half of the twentieth century, an air of intrigue and mystery hovered around Freud`s newly anointed practitioners: psychotherapists. They occupied a strange universe, speaking in a language so incomprehensible but seemingly authoritative that it alternately awed and scared the average man on the street. Psychotherapy is no longer an intellectual movement today as it once was. But in the form of modern professional "caring," it has assumed a new role, which is to provide a peculiar sort of substitute friendship - what we might call "artificial friendship" - for lonely people in a lonely age.
To understand why this occurred and what it means for American culture, one must study the fractious history of the mental health field over the last six decades. It is a complicated story, with a staggering variety of terms, schools, leaders, and techniques, so any overview must necessarily leave out many important details. But from even just a synopsis of the conflicts that gave rise to today`s culture of psychotherapy - battles over who would hold the truest title to physician of the mind, tensions between scientists and clinicians, academics and professionals, elites and the public - we can see more clearly how psychotherapy has profoundly shaped the American conception of what happiness is and how we can achieve it.
|
|
In the context in which it appears `fractious` most nearly means
|
In the mid-1970`s, Walter Alvarez, a geologist, was studying Earth`s polarity. It had recently been learned that the orientation of the planet`s magnetic field reverses, so that every so often, in effect, south becomes north and vice versa. Alvarez and some colleagues had found that a certain formation of pinkish limestone in Italy, known as the scaglia rossa, recorded these occasional reversals. The limestone also contained the fossilized remains of millions of tiny sea creatures called foraminifera. Alvarez became interested in a thin layer of clay in the limestone that seemed to have been laid down around the end of the Cretaceous Period. Below the layer, certain species of foraminifera-or forams, for short-were preserved. In the clay layer, there were no forams. Above the layer, the earlier species disappeared and new forams appeared. Having been taught the uniformitarian view, which held that any apparent extinctions throughout geological time resulted from `the incompleteness of the fossil record` rather than an actual extinction, Alvarez was not sure what to make of the lacuna in geological time corresponding to the missing foraminifera, because the change looked very abrupt.
Had Walter Alvarez not asked his father, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez, how long the clay had taken to deposit, the younger Alvarez may not have thought to use iridium, an element rarely found on earth but more plentiful in meteorites, to answer this question. Iridium, in the form of microscopic grains of cosmic dust, is constantly raining down on the planet. The Alvarezes reasoned that if the clay layer had taken a significant amount of time to deposit, it would contain detectable levels of iridium. The results were startling: far too much iridium had shown up. The Alvarez hypothesis, as it became known, was that everything-not just the clay layer-could be explained by a single event: a six-mile-wide asteroid had slammed into Earth, killing off not only the forams but also the dinosaurs and all the other organisms that went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period.
|
|
Proponents of the uniformitarian view would most likely argue that
|
|
The average size of marine life that washes up on the shore of the Japanese island Ryukyu is smaller than the average size that washes up on the Western coast of Australia. Giant squid have recently been found washed up on the shores of Ryukyu as well as the Western coast of Australia. It can be concluded that the average size of the giant squids on the shore Ryukyu must be less than that of giant squids washed up on the shores of Western Australia.
|
|
The argument above can be attacked on the grounds that it does which of the following?
|
|
An unknown simian virus recently killed off nearly half the human population of a remote jungle town. Because the disease spread at an alarming rate-victims usually exhibited signs within 8 hours of exposure, and many died within 36 hours-the simian virus, if an outbreak occurs again, is likely to cause more deaths than has any other previous virus.
|
|
Which of the following pieces of information most effectively calls into question the validity of the conclusion?
|
The US Constitution established both gold and silver as the basis of US currency: that is to say, it established a bimetallic standard for currency. This remained in place for about a century, until the Coinage Act of 1873, which embraced a "gold only" standard, a monometallic standard, effectively dropping silver as the basis of currency. Over the next several decades, advocates of bimetallism and advocates of the "gold only" standard fiercely debated.
The "gold only" advocates, such as William McKinley, argued that shifts in the relative value of the two precious metals could lead to wild fluctuations in the values of currency in a bimetallic system. Early in the United States history, Alexander Hamilton had tried to fix the gold-silver exchange rate by fiat, but of course, such restraints only inhibit the natural development of a free market.
Unemployment was high in the depression caused by the Panic of 1893, and many argued that these economic challenges had been triggered by abandoning bimetallism. One of the more prominent advocates of bimetallism was William Jennings Bryant: indeed, bimetallism was the very center of his presidential campaigns in 1896 and 1900, both of which he lost to McKinley. Bryant articulated the popular view that a "gold only" standard limited the money supply, and thus favored those who were already quite wealthy, against the interests of working people of all professions. He famously expressed this argument in his "Cross of Gold" speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention, in which he argued that continuing the "gold only" standard would "crucify" the honest laboring classes on a "cross of gold."
Despite the eloquence of Bryant's arguments, history strongly favored the "gold-only" standard. The argument that increasing the money supply would lead to greater prosperity strikes us now as na?ve: of course, we now understand that increasing the monetary supply can lead to runaway inflation, which hurts everyone. Furthermore, gold did not remain as limited as the advocates of bimetallism imagined. In the 1890s, scientists discovered a cyanide process that allowed workers to extract pure gold from much lower grade ore, thus significantly increasing domestic gold production. Additionally, the discovery of two immense gold deposits in South Africa substantially increased world gold supply. Thus, the "gold only" standard allowed for ample currency, and even robust prosperity in the 1920s, so bimetallism died a quiet death.
|
