PT106 · S1 · Q16 Poppy petals function to attract

This would be worth keeping on a first pass, just in case we don't find something more provably true. This is suggestively true, in the sense that petals attract pollinating insects, and once a flower is pollinated (has had its pollen removed or has had another flower's pollen deposited on it) the petals wilt. So it seems plausible that wilted flowers would signal to a pollinating insect, "Oh, let's find another poppy. This one's already been pollinated". But we can't derive that from anything in this paragraph, so this loses out to the more-derivable correct answer.

We've only received information about poppies and their petals. We don't have any support for extrapolating these facts to other plants.

This answer is talking about all kinds of new stuff. We never were told that having pollen on petals did anything! This answer claims that they prevent absorption of nutrients? The idea of "nutrients carried to petals by stems" is wholly new. We don't cover how petals get nourished or talk about nutrients at all. LSAC apparently thinks some students will try to speculate a backstory for why the pollinated poppy petals wilt, whereas the unpollinated ones don't. This answer would potentially provide a story that fits that distinction. But we're not supposed to be inventing stories to explain the facts (unless every other answer is even less supportable than that). We start from a mentality of "which of these must be true / which could be derived from the provided info"?

The information only tells us that a poppy's petals will wilt once the wilting substance has been released. We don't have a way to support the extreme notion that the plant becomes unable to draw nutrients from soil or water. Just because a tree loses its leaves, we don't assume it's suddenly unable to draw nutrients from the ground. Similarly, just because a flower's petals wilt, it doesn't signal that the flower can no longer draw in any nutrients.