Logical Reasoning

PT137 · S4 · Q5 A natural history museum

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A natural history museum contains several displays of wild animals.

Statements

Causal (by)

Drying and mounting → displays of wild animal skins animals

Causal (because)

low humidity and → skins are deteriorating heat of lights

Comparison (older vs. newer)

Older Newer

lit by tungsten lit by compact fluorescent

same light given off

more heat less heat

Evaluate

We read Inference statements primarily looking for overlapping ideas, usually relating to Conditional / Causal / Comparative type language.

We talked about displays of animals skins and we talked about the different lamps used, and in both cases (haha, no pun intended), we talked about the heat given off by the lights.

When we were hearing about a Causal Difference-Maker, we learned that the heat given off by the lights was starting to cause the animals' skins to deteriorate.

In this Comparison, the old tungsten give off more heat than the new compact fluorescent.

So by applying what we learned from the Causal Difference-Maker, the old tungsten leads to more deterioration of the skins than does the new compact fluorescent.

Goal

It's tough to know exactly where this will go, but it seems like they would want us to prove we see the connection between different lamps giving off different amounts of heat and how heat from the light affects the deterioration of the animal skins.

5.

The statements above, if true, most strongly support which one of the following?

  1. Correct

    Some of the older displays

    Why this is right

    This feels pretty supportable, since we know the new compact fluorescent lamps (designed for use in museums) give off as much light but give off less heat. Since in some of the older displays, the skins have started to deteriorate because of low humidity and the heat of the lights, switching to a lamp that gives off less heat should slow the rate of deterioration and help the animal skin last longer.

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

    89% picked this

  2. The displays that are lit

    Unknown Comparison

    We only know how to compare a single tungsten lamp to a single fluorescent (the latter gives off equal light but less heat). But we have no idea how to judge the math of "many tungsten" vs ."few fluorescents".

    3% picked this

  3. More of the displays are

    Unsupported Comparison

    We can certainly see from this paragraph why it make more SENSE to have more fluorescent displays than tungsten displays, but we don't have any information about the current ratio of one lamp to the other. The fluorescent ones, despite being better, might be so new or so expensive that they don't yet outnumber the old school ones.

    1% picked this

  4. The newer displays will not

    Too Strong: no deterioration

    Everything in the universe deteriorates, I'm sad to inform us. It's maybe the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Something about entropy only increases. We could support that the newer displays will be less subject to deterioration because of the heat of the lights. But we don't know how the humidity levels compare for the tungsten vs. fluorescent lamp displays.

    5% picked this

  5. The humidity in the museum

    Unknown Comparison

    We definitely don't have any way to compare humidity throughout the whole museum today vs. in the past. This answer, like (D), seems to want to bait us into believing that fluorescent lamps are lower in humidity. We were never told that. Heat and humidity are two different things. There's more heat in Arizona in the summer (100+ degrees) even though there's more humidity in Florida (when it's only like 80-90 degrees).

    2% picked this

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