Logical Reasoning

PT102 · S2 · Q13 Numismatist: In medieval Spain

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Numismatist: In medieval Spain, most gold coins were minted from gold mined in West Africa, in the area that is now Senegal.

Information

Most gold coins in medieval Spain were minted from gold mined in West Africa (the Senegal area).

This gold was the purest known. It had a gold content of 92%, which allowed coins to be minted without refining the gold.

Coins minted from this Senegalese gold can be recognized because they have that signature 92% gold content.

Mints could refine gold to produce coins with gold content higher than 92%, but Senegalese gold was never refined.

Evaluate

This is a messy bowl of facts. There is a quantifier ("most") in the first sentence, but there aren't any other quantifiers to pair it up with. There aren't any conditionals. It doesn't end with a pivot. In other words, there's not much to suggest where our thinking should go.

There's a little bit of causality. .

That implies that a gold coin has some minimum gold content. If we acquire gold from a less pure source, and it's only 67% gold, we might have to refine it (i.e. remove the impurities) so that the remaining bits are a sufficiently high percentage of gold.

So we can infer that the minimum purity for gold coins was 92% or lower.

Finally, we might infer something by combining the ideas that 1. Senegalese gold was always 92% and can be recognized as such because of the 92%

2. Other gold would get refined, and could go even higher than 92%.

If you can look at a coin and see that it's 92% gold and thus infer that the coin was made with gold mined from the Senegalese area, then that means that other coins were not refined until they landed at 92%. It suggests that only Senegalese gold had 92% purity. We know no other gold started as pure, and it sounds like when that other gold got refined, they didn't stop at a 92% gold composition.

After all if both unrefined Senegalese and refined crappier-gold were both 92%, then how could we look at a 92% gold coin and be so sure it came from Senegalese gold?

Goal

It's hard to predict where this is headed. We would want to give is a comfy second read for deeper comprehension. We might see a couple "hidden" facts in there that could be what the correct answer goes for, but we should stay flexible.

13.

Which one of the following inferences about gold coins minted in medieval Spain is most strongly supported by the information the numismatist gives?

Coins minted from Senegalese gold
Too Strong: all / same
We know that all the Senegalese gold was 92%, so coins minted from that would theoretically all have the same proportion of gold (92%). But we don't know if all the coins were the same weight, because we don't know whether all the coins were the same volume. Did they have really precise molds for these coins, where each coin came out with exactly the same volume? We don't know. Maybe some were slightly bigger or smaller than others, and so the weight may have differed.
11% picked this
Correct
The source of some refined
Why this is right
The last sentence tells us that "mints produced other kinds of coins (non-Senegalese) that were refined into having gold content higher than 92%". We know that Senegalese gold was the purest unrefined gold you could find, at 92%. So just combining those two facts, we know that some coins were made by taking unrefined non-Senegalese gold (which means its gold content was less than 92%) and refining it until its gold content was higher than 92%.
Skill tested: Most Supported · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
55% picked this
Two coins could have the
Out of Scope: same monetary value
If we found out that they used both Senegalese gold and non-Senegalese gold to make a "1 dollar" coin, then we could support this answer, since those 1 dollar coins would have the same monetary value but would differ in gold content depending on whether Senegalese or refined non-Senegalese gold was used. But we were never told that both Senegalese gold and non-Senegalese gold were ever used to make the same type of coin. It's possible that Senegalese gold was only used for the "5 dollar" coin, and non-Senegalese gold was never used for that type of coin.
12% picked this
No gold coins were minted
Too Strong: none
We know that the gold content of Senegalese gold was the highest in the land (at 92%) and that having such a high content allowed the coins to be minted without first being refined. Were we told that Senegalese gold was unique in that sense? Were we told that all other coins had to be refined before being minted? Were we told that when gold was refined to make a coin, it was always refined to at least 92%? No, none of those. For all we know there was unrefined gold that was 91% gold and that was still pure enough that it didn't need to be refined before being minted. For all we know there was crappier gold that got refined until it was 91% and then minted. We don't know what the minimum gold content is for minting a coin. We only know that 92% is high enough.
9% picked this
The only unrefined gold from
Too Strong: the only
This has a lot of overlap with what we said about (D). It's totally possible that there was some unrefined gold with a gold content of 91% that was minted without first being refined. That wouldn't go against anything in the passage.
13% picked this

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