Logical Reasoning

PT18 · S2 · Q18 The television documentary went beyond

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The television documentary went beyond the save-the-wildlife pieties of some of those remote from East Africa and showed that in a country pressed for food, the elephant is a pest, and an intelligent pest at that.

Setup

The documentary didn't strike the tone you'd typically see from an wildlife documentary out of East Africa: "Elephants are beautiful and we must save them".

Instead, the doc from East Africa was like, "Damn these elephants are annoyingly smart."

There seems to be no way to protect East African farms from elephant herds coming in at night and foraging the farm's crops.

Fill-in-the-blank

This example illustrates that ....

Evaluate

Our goal is to synthesize the things we've heard. We heard that elephants are kind of an unsolvable problem for East African farmers, although documentaries from outside that area would have probably viewed the elephants more sympathetically.

Pious = religious adherence / virtuous Pieties = sanctimonious (holier-than-thou) sentiments

Goal

Look for a safely worded takeaway that seems to blend info from each of the first two sentences.

18.

Which one of the following most logically completes the paragraph?

  1. Correct

    the preservation of wildlife may

    Why this is right

    The most enticing part of this answer is the soft language of "may". It's also alluring because it combines the "save-the-elephant" wildlife conservation sentiment from the first sentence with the "these elephants trampled our farm" concern from the second sentence. Preserving elephants in East Africa may endanger the welfare of human farmers, as there seems to be no way to protect these farms from herds of night-raiding elephants.

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

    82% picked this

  2. it is time to remove

    Too Strong

    Too Strong: time to remove them Out of Scope: endangered This paragraph hasn't identified the elephants as endangered, so we don't have any momentum for "time to remove them from the list of endangered species!"

    2% picked this

  3. television documentaries are incapable of

    Too Strong: incapable

    The author said that "some documentaries remote from East Africa" contain wildlife pieties. That's a far cry from saying that documentaries are incapable of doing more than regurgitating pieties (which sounds like it would apply to all tv documentaries). This answer choice is also more or less contradicted by the fact that the documentary that this paragraph is talking about "went beyond the usual pieties", so clearly tv documentaries are capable of doing more than regurgitating accepted pieties.

    5% picked this

  4. farmers and agricultural agents should

    Too Strong: should work closely w/

    This sounds like the author is saying "farmers shouldn't try to control elephants by themselves ... they should work closely with conservationists". That would demonstrate a fear that if farmers were to try to control elephants by themselves, they would wipe out the elephant population. The author doesn't appear to be afraid of this or speaking from a place of concern for the elephants. The author sounds more like she's saying, "these pious western documentaries are all about saving the elephants, but locals are wondering who's gonna save them from the elephants!"

    11% picked this

  5. it is unfair that people

    Out of Scope: unfair / food shortages

    This paragraph discusses farms being raided by elephants, but it doesn't indicate that there is any food shortage that results, nor does it sound like it's complaining about how unfair food shortages are.

    1% picked this

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