Researchers compared the brains of recently deceased people who had schizophrenia with those of recently deceased people who did not have schizophrenia.
Information
math-y / contrast
35% of the recently dead people who had schizophrenia had damage to subplate (a structure of nerve cells).
0% of the recently dead people who didn’t have schizophrenia had damage to subplate.
causal The damage must have occurred prior to the 2nd fetal trimester.
During that period, the development of the connections between different parts of the brain are controlled by the subplate.
Evaluate
The fact that the paragraph starts by establishing a weird difference that is only found in the brains of the schizophrenics should pique our curiosity: what does it mean that 35% of schizophrenics had damage to this subplate but none of the brains without schizophrenia had it?
The last two ideas make it seem like if you had a damaged subplate prior to the 2nd fetal trimester, it could mess up the development of connections between the different parts of the brain.
Since outside knowledge of schizophrenia tells us that such patients often seem to have “multiple personalities”, you wonder whether this paragraph is trying to make us speculate that schizophrenia is caused (in some cases) by damage to the subplate, resulting in a disconnected brain.
Goal
It seems hard to guess exactly where this one is going, so let’s look for the most supportable answer, being wary of answers that are Too Strong, make an Unsupported Comparison, or bring up something Out of Scope.