Logical Reasoning

PT7 · S1 · Q16 Comets do not give off

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Comets do not give off their own light but reflect light from other sources, such as the Sun.

Facts

causal / anti-causal

comets don't give off light, comes do reflect light from other sources (like the Sun)

rule (volume dial)

The more mass, the more light it reflects.

pivot (however)

It turns out that the material in Halley's comet reflects way less light per unit of mass than we used think.

Evaluate

When the final fact in an Inference stimulus has a Pivot, that fact is usually creating some tension with what came before it, and the correct answer usually addresses that tension.

The overlap between the last two claims is "light reflected".

We find out that we were wrong about Halley's comet's light reflecting properties.

Since we know that scientists estimate mass based on reflected light, that would seem to imply that we were also wrong about Halley's mass.

Goal

Let's look for something saying that we need to revise our assessment of Halley's comet mass, since we base that on brightness and we were confused about what material we were measuring.

Since Halley's comet turns out to be less reflective than normal, we probably thought it was 60 times less massive than it really is.

16.

The statements above, if true, give the most support to which one of the following?

  1. Some comets are composed of

    Unsupported

    This plays off an ambiguity in the last sentence. Are we learning that Halley's comet is unlike most comets? They're made of the material that's 60x more reflective, whereas Halley's is weirdly made of this other material? Or did Halley's comet teach us that ALL comets are made of this material that's 60x less reflective than we thought? Either one could be true. It's also possible that we thought Halley's was made out of weird material that 30% more reflective than most comets whereas it turns out it's 30% less reflective. Because of all these possibilities, we don't actually know if there's a "regular" comet that's 60x more reflective than Halley's.

    4% picked this

  2. Correct

    Previous estimates of the mass

    Why this is right

    We just found out that Halley's is actually made out of much duller material than we thought. And since brightness is how we measure mass, we weren't giving it enough credit for how massive it is, because the dull material was fooling us. We used to think it reflected 60 lumens per ton. We now realize it actually only reflects 1 lumen per ton. If its brightness to us is 600 lumens, then we would have previously calculated that it must have 10 tons of mass (600/60 = 10). But now we would calculate that it has 600 tons of mass (600/1 = 600). (Don't laugh at my terrible example units / numbers, scientists)

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

    46% picked this

  3. The total amount of light

    Unsupported

    We want an answer saying our thoughts about MASS were wrong. This is saying our thoughts about how much light was reflected (i.e. how bright it appears to us) was wrong. The apparent brightness didn't change. We're just interpreting that brightness differently now that we know what dull material it's made from.

    36% picked this

  4. The reflective properties of the

    Unsupported

    Just like (A), this hinges on whether you think Halley's is an oddball, or whether we just learned via Halley's that all comets are made out of duller material than we thought. Either one is possible, so we can't support this claim about variation across comets. We have no information about how reflective different comets' materials are relative to each other.

    8% picked this

  5. Scientists need more information before

    Unsupported

    With the new reflectivity figure, scientists can potentially revise their estimate using the same brightness data — they don't necessarily need more information to make a better estimate. The stimulus gives no basis for saying the existing data is insufficient.

    6% picked this

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