Scientist: Physicists claim that their system

Answer choices

1. A

   Correct55% picked this

   Major incidents of scientific fraud in a scientific discipline are deleterious to progress

   Why this is right

   This gives us a linking idea between "doing things that biologists did, in order to prevent major fraud incidents" and the new term in the conclusion "conducive to progress". "Deleterious" means "damaging, injurious, bad". If major fraud is bad for progress, then preventing major fraud should be good for progress.

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

   55%
2. B

   Weak Impact17% picked this

   Very few incidents of even minor scientific fraud have occurred in biology over the

   Cool, biology has cleaned up its act even more than we already were told. But that doesn't add much to the conversation. It was already compelling that biology, by effecting certain fraud-prevention measures, had prevented any major incidents of fraud in the past 20 years. To find out that it's been almost as effective with minor fraud is both less impressive and less impactful, so it's a very weak strengthener to the notion that biology's efforts have been successful at expunging fraud.

   17%
3. C

   Weak Impact18% picked this

   No system of careful peer review is completely effective in preventing scientific fraud in

   This just means that "all systems of peer review still let some fraud through the cracks". That's an incredibly weak claim, but the author could say, "Physicists say that their system of peer review effectively prevents fraud, but all systems of peer review are not able to prevent 100% of cases." If peer review prevented 99.9% of cases, wouldn't we still think it's effective? I use a lot of anti-bacterial soaps that kill only 99.9% of germs and I still think of them as effective. Saying that "at least one piece of fraud slips through your peer review, Physicists!" is too weak to be a correct answer.

   18%
4. D

   Weakens8% picked this

   Twenty years ago the system of peer review in biology was less effective in preventing scientific fraud than the system of peer

   The author needs modern physics fraud protection to be fair to compare to biologists' fraud protection from 20 years ago. He's assuming that since the biologists were wrong, the modern physicists are wrong. So he's assuming that modern physicists are comparably vulnerable to fraud as those old biologists were. This says the opposite and would hurt the author's argument: "The physicists might be correct when they say they have effective fraud protection. Yes, the biologists were wrong, but the biologists has a less effective system than physics' peer review."

   8%
5. E

   Weakens2% picked this

   Over the years, there have been relatively few, if any, major incidents of scientific

   This makes it seem like there's not much of a fraud problem to worry about in physics.

   2%