From an analysis of broken pottery

Answer choices

1. A

   Correct70% picked this

   The building timber bore marks suggesting that it had been salvaged from

   Why this is right

   This answer is saying, "Yes, the wood is older than 1000 B.C., but the wood was from an earlier settlement, not the one whose pottery and statuary we're analyzing. This settlement wasn't established until 1000 B.C., but apparently some of the wood they used was reclaimed from whatever settlement had existed there before". Someone might build a gelato shop in Rome and use a stone from the Colosseum. If future archaeologists were determining when this gelato shop was established, they shouldn't go off how old the stone from the Colosseum is. When someone does a tear-down remodel of a house, they might keep some of the original studs / frame of the old house (i.e. "This house has good bones. Let's just strip it down to the studs.) If that frame were erected in 1920 but the house was remodeled in 2020, we shouldn't say this new house was established in 1920.

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

   70%
2. B

   Weak Impact2% picked this

   The pieces of pottery and fragments of statues that were analyzed come from several parts

   This does do a little to weaken, since we have conflicting evidence: a piece of timber that's older than 1000 B.C. and pieces of pottery that look to be from 1000 B.C. This answer gives a little more strength to the pottery evidence, saying that it comes from several parts of the site (i.e. maybe it's more representative). But several isn't a particularly strong idea. And the author can always say, "Sure, I'm not denying that there is pottery and statuary at the settlement from 1000 B.C. I'm just saying that stuff was added later. The settlement was established much earlier, given that some of the wood used is much older." (A) attacks her central assumption that "the settlement is as old as the oldest piece of material we found there".

   2%
3. C

   Weak Impact17% picked this

   The tests used to determine the age of the pottery and statuary had been devised more recently than those used to determine

   Weak Impact This is very similar to (B). It makes the pottery / statuary evidence sound someone more robust or trustworthy than the timber evidence. There would be no way to rank (B) vs. (C) in terms of which has more weakening impact, which suggests that neither one is right. (A) weakens more than this because it makes the author's one piece of evidence (timber from pre-1000 B.C.) totally irrelevant to the conversation (it wasn't from this settlement). (B) and (C) are just making the author's piece of evidence less compelling than the counterevidence.

   17%
4. D

   No Impact3% picked this

   The site has yielded many more samples of pottery and statuary than

   This is very similar to (B) and (C). We could say maybe it still has a scintilla of weakening impact, but counting up how many samples we've found of each type isn't really any sort of attack. For number of samples to become an attack, we would need to hear something more like, "Despite a thorough search of the rest of the settlement in which many more samples of pottery and statuary were found, no other pieces of building timber were found". That might make us think that this piece of timber the author is relying on wasn't really part of the settlement. It was just some random scrap found in the same area. But this answer is going to a place where we could start thinking like that.

   3%
5. E

   Strengthens, if anything7% picked this

   The type of pottery found at the site is similar to a type of pottery associated with civilizations

   This doesn't really do anything, because "style" of pottery is not what we care about -- "age" of the pottery is. But, if anything, being told that the pottery resembles earlier stuff would just strengthen the author's case.

   7%