Logical Reasoning

PT105 · S2 · Q1 French divers recently found a

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French divers recently found a large cave along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.

Statements

They found a cave you can only access through an underwater tunnel. The inside of the cave is filled with seawater. There are stalagmites, which are pillars of stone that form when water keeps dropping on the same spot for centuries, building up a tower of mineral deposits.

Evaluate / Goal

There don't seem to be any Conditional, Causal, Mathematical, or Pivot ideas in this paragraph, so it's hard to sense where this would be going. Just head to the answers and look for the most provable claim, being cautious if we see anything that looks Too Strong, looks like an Unsupported Comparison, or looks like it's talking about something Out of Scope.

1.

The information above most strongly supports which one of the following?

  1. The Mediterranean Sea was at

    Contradiction

    If anything, we would say that the sea used to be lower. This cave interior had to be open-air at some point, or else you couldn't have stalagmites form. If the cave is currently underwater but used to be open-air, then the water level probably used to be lower.

    8% picked this

  2. Correct

    The water level within the

    Why this is right

    You can't have a stalagmite form unless there's a way for water to drip off the ceiling onto the floor. If you dropped water into a pool, a stalagmite wouldn't form, because the drop would just get washed away. The water has to keep hitting the same spot on the cave floor, so that mineral deposits slowly get higher and higher until a stalagmite has formed. Since the cave is currently filled with seawater but at some point it was possible for water to drip off the ceiling onto the cave floor, we know that the water level was lower in the past (i.e. it wasn't filled with water).

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

    81% picked this

  3. The French divers were the

    Too Strong: first people

    Just because we're only hearing about French divers finding this cave doesn't mean they were the first to find it. Perhaps this cave has been written about in ancient Greek books. Perhaps Algerian divers had already found this cave before. We don't know.

    2% picked this

  4. There was once an entrance

    Out of Scope: 2nd entrance

    As far as we know, the cave is only accessible via an underwater tunnel. We have no way to say that there used to be a separate entrance.

    3% picked this

  5. Seawater in the Mediterranean has

    Unknown Comparison

    We can't rank the mineral content of seawater now vs. then. As long as the seawater had any mineral content, it would potentially be able to form stalagmites over time, so the existence of stalagmites doesn't tell us anything in particular about mineral concentration.

    6% picked this

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