Essayist: When the first prehistoric

Answer choices

1. A

   Opposite / Strengthens9% picked this

   Animals weakened by disease are not only less able to avoid hunters but are also less able to

   This adds plausibility to the idea that disease was the crucial factor, since it points out that disease also exacerbates other threats such as hunters and animal predators.

   9%
2. B

   Too Weak3% picked this

   Human beings generally have a substantial degree of biological immunity to the diseases carried

   Yeah, we have a substantial immunity of other species, but our blind spot is usually species from other ecosystems. To this day, when people travel to far away countries, they tend to avoid drinking the local water because the local microorganisms are foreign to their guts. We already know from a premise that in the case of the newly arriving humans/animals there were disease-causing microorganisms. So we're not going to wriggle out of this author's conclusion by making it seem like North Americans were immune to these new agents.

   3%
3. C

   Correct64% picked this

   Very few species of North American animals not hunted by the new arrivals from Asia were extinct 2,000

   Why this is right

   This answer makes hunting seem like the crucial factor. If very few of the non-hunted species went extinct, then it sounds like whether you were hunted or not was a big causal difference-maker. This answer is weird since it seems to just go against the author's idea that "it's implausible that hunting could have such an effect", but that's our author's opinion. If this answer is true, then it's certainly raises our doubt about whether we should crown "disease" as the primary cause of extinctions.

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

   64%
4. D

   Strengthens, if Anything15% picked this

   Individual humans and animals can carry a disease-causing microorganism without themselves suffering

   Words that only guarantee "at least one case", such as could, may, might, some, sometimes, not all, are usually wrong on Strengthen, Weaken, and Paradox. Plus, the idea that you could carry a disease without suffering from it actually helps the author's hypothesis by reassuring us that the humans coming from Asia would be able to make the trip, even while carrying a disease.

   15%
5. E

   Too Weak8% picked this

   Some species of North American animals became extinct more than 2,000 years after the arrival in North America of the first

   Too Weak: "some" Out of Scope: "more than 2000 years after" It's a total "so what" fact to bring to this conversation that "at least one species of animal went extinct more than 2000 years after humans arrived". Of course at least one went extinct. We assume that many species still go extinct to this day, which is way later than 2000 years after humans arrived.

   8%