Evolutionary Implications of Cooking

Answer choices

1. A

   Unknown Comparison1% picked this

   A raw-food diet is significantly healthier for modern humans than a

   Unknown Comparison: raw vs. normal Too Strong: significantly healthier Nothing in the passage suggests that cooked diets are healthier or that raw food is healthier. But given that we were told that modern humans can barely survive on a raw-food diet, it seems far from supportable to call that type of diet healthier.

   1%
2. B

   Reverses Causality28% picked this

   Humans would not be able to utilize cooked food in their diet if during their evolution they had

   The last two sentences of the first paragraph are suggesting a reversed timeline: 1. we figured out how to cook food 2. this meant we could now eat some foods with high caloric density more efficiently 3. this meant our bodies started selecting for efficiency in eating foods of high caloric density 4. this resulted in our bodies' being adapted to cooked, not raw, food.

   28%
3. C

   Unknown Comparison8% picked this

   Early humans controlled fire long before they adopted the practice of

   Unknown Comparison: fire vs. cooking Too Strong: long before We have no way from the passage to know which came first: fire or cooking. Presumably it was fire, because how could you cook without fire. But we don't know that it was long before. Maybe shortly after we discovered fire, we started trying to cook foods. The end of the 2nd paragraph definitely makes it seem like we may have had fire (1.9 million years ago) long before we were able or inclined to boil water (100,000 years ago). But you can cook without boiling water, so we wouldn't say "when we started boiling is when we started cooking".

   8%
4. D

   Opposite7% picked this

   The practice of eating a diet of cooked food did not become standard until humans were able to

   "Sedentary lives" is mentioned only in the first paragraph, and only in the context of telling us that were we to try to survive on raw foods, we'd need to live in an urban environment and live a sedentary (non-active) life. This suggests that we don't have a lot of energy to burn when we're eating raw food (that's why we'd have to stay sedentary). By contrast, we are adapted to eating cooked food and aren't adapted to sedentary lifestyles. So the passage is suggesting that by eating cooked food, we were actually able to make more efficient use of foods with high caloric density (i.e. before cooking, we'd eat a high caloric density food and most of it would pass out our body without being broken down and metabolized .... with cooking, we're able to break that dense food down so that we can metabolize more of the food and thus we have more calories to burn on non-sedentary, active living). Thus, this idea seems opposed to the thrust of what we know.

   7%
5. E

   Correct56% picked this

   Empirical evidence does not yet definitively show that early humans developed biological adaptations to a

   Why this is right

   This is super weak language, so it's easy to support it. It would be strong language to say that empirical evidence definitively shows that early humans adapted to cooked food. If empirical evidence had already shown that, we wouldn't even be reading this passage, which is trying to convince us that it's possible that humans adapted to cooked food. Our "However" sentence in P1 says that current evidence suggests that .. Two sentences later, These points suggest that Next sentence, the widespread assumption appears to be wrong. Last sentence of P1, selection for efficiency, we suggest, led to inability to survive on raw-food. We've also got the third paragraph, which is saying that we can't even reconstruct the soft parts early humans' digestive system because they leave no fossil record. The empirical evidence we have is sparse, incomplete, and open to interpretation. That means it is not definitive proof of anything.

   Skill tested: Author Opinion · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

   56%