During the three months before

Answer choices

1. A

   Correct82% picked this

   Before the California earthquake, no more of the students in California than of those in Ontario

   Why this is right

   This answer sort of serves both functions (it doesn't need to serve both to be a good answer). A potential alternate explanation for why the California kids had earthquake dreams is that earthquakes are a huge part of the cultural landscape in California. Even if you've never directly experience one, you see people buying earthquake kits, you hear people tell stories about quakes, you ride the Earthquake ride at Universal Studios. So it's possible that the real cause of earthquake dreams is "living in California" vs. "living in Ontario". But this answer rules out that possibility, because the California kids didn't have a higher rate of earthquake dreams until they actually experienced the earthquake! We can also just understand this answer as a version of the classic No Cause, No Effect plausibility strengthener. The author thought that experiencing an earthquake caused the higher rate of earthquake dreams among the Cali students. This answer corroborates that by saying, "Prior to the earthquake (when the Cali students hadn't yet experienced an earthquake), they didn't have a higher rate of dreaming".

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

   82%
2. B

   No Impact1% picked this

   The students in California were members of a class studying dreams and dream recollection, but the students

   This neither rules out an alternate explanation for why the Cali kids had more earthquake dreams, nor does it make it more plausible that experiencing an earthquake is what caused half the Cali kids to have earthquake dreams.

   1%
3. C

   Weak Impact8% picked this

   Before they started keeping records of their dreams, many of the students in California had experienced

   Many doesn't have a strict definition, but we can use "at least 5". Does it help the plausibility of the author's case to say that at least 5 of these Cali students had previously experienced an earthquake? It doesn't really. It wouldn't make any difference if none of the Cali kids had ever experienced a prior earthquake. Since they all experienced one 3 months into the study and then half of them had earthquake dreams after that, the author already has a basis for arguing that experiencing the quake caused the earthquake dream. We'd be interested in knowing whether those students who had experienced an earthquake prior to the study also had earthquake dreams in the months following that earthquake.

   8%
4. D

   No Impact: quantity of dreams1% picked this

   The students in Ontario reported having more dreams overall, per student, than the students

   The raw number of dreams a student has doesn't make any difference to this conversation. If a student were thinking, "Couldn't an alternate explanation for why the Cali students had more earthquake dreams be that they just have more dreams, period? (So they have more chances for a dream to be about earthquakes)." If so, then this answer would be ruling out that alternate explanation. The problem with that logic is that it would be a very weak alternate explanation to argue that the Cali students had more earthquake dreams because they had a higher number of dreams. After all, there's no common sense idea that says, "if X has more dreams than Y does, then X is more likely to have dreams about earthquakes than Y is."

   1%
5. E

   No Impact8% picked this

   The students in Ontario who reported having dreams about earthquakes recorded the dreams as having occurred

   One might look at this answer and think, "Is this saying that hearing about the California earthquake caused these Ontario students to have earthquake dreams"? So does that strengthen the author's claim that earthquakes cause earthquake dreams? No, not only would that be a huge leap for us to assume that the Ontario students' few earthquake dreams were in relation to the California quake, but the conclusion is also specifically about experiencing an earthquake. So hearing about an earthquake wouldn't make any difference to the conversation.

   8%