Since 1945 pesticide use in the United States

Answer choices

1. A

   No Impact8% picked this

   Extension agents employed by state governments to advise farmers have recently advocated using smaller amounts of pesticide, though in past years

   Whether they advised less/same/more, we know the reality is that 10 times as much was used, so this answer isn't giving us a way to explain how that much pesticide could allow twice as much crop loss to pests.

   8%
2. B

   Correct80% picked this

   While pesticide-resistant strains of insects were developing, crop rotation, which for insects disrupts a stable food supply, was gradually abandoned because farmers’ eligibility to

   Why this is right

   This answer provides two separate causal mechanisms for why we have more crop loss, despite so much more pesticide: 1. insects have been developing resistance to pesticides, so it doesn't matter how much pesticide we use on those critters. It doesn't hurt them, so they just stay and munch our crops. 2. Farmers abandoned crop rotation, which was previously a method of controlling crop pests. The rest of the answer just adds a bunch of detail about why crop rotation helped guard against crop pests as well as what led to farmers abandoning crop rotation, but we don't really care about all those extraneous details. The functionality of this answer is all we care about. - Farmers stopped doing crop rotation (they stopped doing something that reduced crop loss to insects) - Insects started resisting insecticide (so even though we're using 10 times as much, it doesn't affect them) This explains how we could still have more crop loss nowadays.

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

   80%
3. C

   No Impact3% picked this

   Since 1970 the pesticides most lethal to people have generally been replaced by less-lethal chemicals that are equally effective against insects and have a

   This does give us a change in pesticides ... if we're using 10 times as much pesticide but this new pesticide is crappy, then that could explain why we have even more crop damage than before. But, this answer choice said that this new pesticide is equally effective against insects, so it doesn't help us at all to explain why using 10 times as much insect poison is coexisting with twice as much insect-caused crop damage.

   3%
4. D

   No Impact / No Difference6% picked this

   Because farmers’ decisions about how much land to plant are governed by their expectations about crop prices at harvest time, the amount of pesticide

   This gives us some backstory into some of the considerations farmers think about when deciding on amount of pesticide, but this doesn't show us anything that has changed since 1945, and we already know how much pesticide has been used (10 times as much, for a similar area of land).

   6%
5. E

   No Impact3% picked this

   Although some pesticides can be removed from foodstuffs through washing, others are taken up into the edible portion of plants, and consumers have begun

   This gives some info that would potentially suggest that some farmers might not want to use as much pesticide, since some consumers will boycott produce containing too much pesticides. But this answer doesn't speak to anything that's changed since 1945, and it's not like we can use this answer to say "there's twice as much damage from insects, because farmers don't want to use insecticide, because consumers will boycott their products." We already know as a fact that the farmers HAVE used 10 times as much pesticide. We need a way to explain how, given that, there could still be twice as much crop damage from pests.

   3%