In many languages other than English

Answer choices

1. A

   Correct61% picked this

   Speakers of English are able to distinguish between lighter and darker shades of the color they call “blue, ” for which Russian

   Why this is right

   This shows that there's no automatic link between whether you have words for it and whether you can perceptually distinguish it. English has fewer words for "blue" than Russian has, but speakers of English can still distinguish between those two different Russian "blues" (lighter blue / darker blue). Thus, a language that has fewer colors than English would be in the same position that English speakers are compared to Russian speakers. Having fewer words apparently doesn't mean you are to distinguish fewer hues. This answer attacks the central assumption of the argument.

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

   61%
2. B

   No Impact3% picked this

   Almost every language distinguishes red from the

   This doesn't give us any way to argue that, "even if language X has fewer color words than language Y, that doesn't mean people who speak X can perceptually distinguish fewer colors than people who speak Y." It just says that almost all languages have a word for red.

   3%
3. C

   Unclear Impact21% picked this

   Khmer uses a basic word corresponding to English “blue” for most leaves, but uses its basic word corresponding to

   This answer isn't clearly about what people can / can't perceptually distinguish. It just sounds like Khmer has a color word that they use specifically with a fruit.

   21%
4. D

   No Impact4% picked this

   The word “orange” in English has the same origin as the equivalent

   This doesn't give us any way to argue that, "even if language X has fewer color words than language Y, that doesn't mean people who speak X can perceptually distinguish fewer colors than people who speak Y." It just says that the word for "orange" in two languages happens to have a similar root word.

   4%
5. E

   Unclear Impact11% picked this

   Most languages do not have a basic word that distinguishes gray from other colors, although gray is

   We might try to read this as, "See, author? Lots of language don't have a color word for gray even though they can perceptually distinguish gray (I mean, it is commonly found in nature)." That's a stretch, most importantly because we have an available answer in (A) that doesn't need us to make any such stretch on the answer's behalf. Here, we'd be thinking "commonly found in nature = people can perceptually distinguish that color"? But with (A), it was the more comfortable "able to distinguish between two shades = can perceptually distinguish two different colors".

   11%