No one knows what purposes

Answer choices

1. A

   Too Strong: smallest / most5% picked this

   The animals with the smallest brains spend the most

   This glosses over the nuances of this hypothesis. It's not predicting that "the more you sleep, you smaller your brain is". It's predicting that "the more you dream, the more your brain can clear out clutter so that your memory works better".

   5%
2. B

   Too Strong: virtually no accidentals10% picked this

   Immediately after a person awakens from normal sleep, her or his memory contains virtually no

   The hypothesis believes that dreams help to erase parasitic connections (i.e. accidental associations between ideas). It never says that dreams clear out almost all accidental associations. This just gets too quantitatively precise and extreme for us to derive it.

   10%
3. C

   Correct71% picked this

   When a mammal that would normally dream is prevented from dreaming, the functioning of its

   Why this is right

   The hypothesis is that dreams clear out some of the parasitic connections that would otherwise clog up our memories. This answer is doing to ol' Flip the Causal Difference-Maker. It stands to reason then if we don't dream, we won't get rid of the parasitic connections, and so our memories will be clogged up. The reason they specify "a mammal that would normally dream" is because the passage allows for the idea that some animals might evolve a different "solution" for this problem (rather than dreaming, these animals just have larger brains so that they can handle that extra clutter). So the answer is specifying that we're not talking about that sort of creature. We're talking about a mammal that does regularly dream.

   Skill tested: Most Supported · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

   71%
4. D

   Out of Scope8% picked this

   Insofar as a person’s description of a dream involves meaningful associations between ideas, it is

   Out of Scope: description of a dream Nothing in the passage or the hypothesis is talking about how people describe their dreams. We're only talking about the biological purpose served by dreaming.

   8%
5. E

   Too Strong: all animals5% picked this

   All animals other than the spiny

   We have pretty good support for the idea that "all mammals other than the spiny anteater dream", but we can't say that the spiny anteater is the only animal on Earth that doesn't dream.

   5%