#25 - Specific Reference, Strengthen

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below! Thank you!

[rappel2]

Hello, can you please explain how we can think of drinking milk as cooking? I was between B and E but decided against B because technically you don't need to cook to produce milk - unless I am missing something. I think I understand why E is not a great answer (just because there were biological changes doesn't mean they were related to cooking) but I wasn't happy with either answer. What is the best way to go about tackling this question? Thanks!

[James Finch]

Hi Rappel,

The claim that we're being asked to strengthen isn't about cooking per se, but rather that it happened long enough ago that its invention could have influenced human evolution (as evolution takes a long time). The information given is that there is evidence of cooking going back 250,000 years, so having another case of humans evolving in less than that span of time would serve to strengthen the conclusion that cooking, which dates back 250,000, also could have influenced human evolution.

(B) serves this purpose by giving us another case (evolutionary adaptation to drinking cow milk) that occurred at most 5,000 years ago, which serves to greatly bolster the idea that 250,000 years was plenty of times for humans to evolve in response to cooking food. (E), on the other hand, is completely irrelevant to the argument we're concerned with here, as we're only trying to show that it is possible for cooking to have influenced evolution in the timeframe since its invention, not how brain size may have increased due to evolutionary changes brought about by cooked food.

Hope this clears things up!

[chrisfromc123]

For Answer E, why is it that there would be no relation between brain size (or at least brain/body ratio) and cooking?

This seems to be one of those answers which does not necessitate specific knowledge about biology, but even from high school biology class, it would seem that increased brain size would lead to better ability to cook (higher intelligence to complete a complicated function that is pretty exclusive to only one species).

I understand the point of recency and how on a second look, answer B appears right. But is there not any connection between brain size and cooking and how much basic/outside knowledge should we be bringing in to some of these questions.

Thanks

[Robert Carroll]

Chris,

Linking the answer choice to cooking is completely irrelevant to the claim we're trying to strengthen. That claim we are trying to strengthen is about how recent a practice has to be to have an impact on biological evolution. The author wants to show that even things that happened relatively recently can have an impact on biological evolution. Answer choice (E) is saying that brain size evolved along with tooth and jaw size. Well, we already have whatever information we have about the time frame of tooth and jaw size evolution. Saying that another kind of evolution occurred over the same time frame is not giving us any new information about how quickly biological evolution can happen. The time frame in answer choice (E) for the new kind of evolution (brain size) seems identical to that for the already-known types of evolution (tooth and jaw size). If it's not identical, the answer certainly doesn't make the time frame any shorter.

It's not about what adaptations happened, but how quickly they happened, because the claim we're trying to strengthen is one about time frame. No one seems to be doubting that adaptations can occur; some people, contra the author, are saying they can't happen quickly enough. So information about how quickly adaptations occur is the information relevant to strengthening this argument.

Robert Carroll

[a2000]

Less of a question, more of an observation (unless I'm wrong, in which case, let me know!). I incorrectly chose C because I was trying to establish that cooking was not especially recent. (That answer may not accomplish that goal either, but it's wrong in any case.) In other words, I was trying to support a premise rather than the conclusion. For the statement in question, we have to support (my paraphrase) "the idea that cooking (whose age is established) is too recent to affect evolution is wrong." The answer choice of "this other thing affected evolution relatively quickly" supports that conclusion, hence B is correct.

[Luke Haqq]

Hi a2000!

Yes, your explanation sounds correct. This question stem references the sentence from the first paragraph, "Furthermore, the widespread assumption that cooking could not have had any impact on biological evolution because its practice is too recent appears to be wrong" (lines 16-19).

This is a strengthen question, so we want an answer choice that reinforces the view that this widespread assumption is wrong. You correctly note that answer choice (B) is effectively saying, "this other thing affected evolution relatively quickly," so, the answer choice supports the conclusion by reinforcing that there was enough time in the case of cooking for biological/anatomical change to take place (indeed, the answer choice suggests change is possible on a much shorter time scale than in the passage).

[Jude.m.stone@gmail.com]

Hi! I now see why B is correct, but I incorrectly chose D because like the student who commented above, my prephrase involved finding a way to show that cooking wasn't developed recently (I now see that a better prephrase accounts for the possibility of showing that cooking wasn't developed recently OR that recent behaviors can impact our biological evolution, which B does). But I'm having trouble disproving D in a satisfactory way to make sure I don't make a similar mistake in the future. My reasoning for choosing D was that the author says that cooking made food easier to digest and helped us increase our caloric intake ("cooked food created opportunities for humans to use diets of high caloric density more efficiently"). So because D said that evidence shows that early humans show a spike in the quantity of plants they ate, I took that as evidence that early humans must have increase the amount of plants they could eat by using cooking to overcome the "low digestibility of much raw plant food." Since that seemed to satisfy my prephrase by demonstrating that cooking couldn't have been recent since early humans were using it, I thought I got the correct answer and moved on.

Any advice on where I went astray and how to avoid that in the future?

Also, this raises a general question for me: when we're asked to strengthen/weaken a sentence within an RC passage, are we supposed to take that sentence individually when considering the answer choices, or take it in the context of the rest of the passage? Thank you!

[Adam Tyson]

The claim we are asked to support in this question, Jude.m.stone@gmail.com , is not about how recent cooking is, but whether cooking has been around long enough to impact human evolution. You have to focus on the issue of human evolution to strengthen that claim. Even if we had said that cooking had been around for a million years, we would still need evidence that human evolution could have been affected in that timeframe, and answer D does nothing to connect those ideas. So what if there's more strontium in our bones? So what if we began to eat more plants? The question is whether any of that caused us to adapt in some way! Has cooking had time to change us?

I notice that you tried to help the answer by making some assumptions, such as:

So because D said that evidence shows that early humans show a spike in the quantity of plants they ate

Never make any assumptions when analyzing the answers! The correct answer is correct without our help, and as soon as you try to help an answer be better by adding your assumptions, you're almost certainly rationalizing why a bad answer might somehow be acceptable.

As to your last question, context is almost always an important consideration in RC questions. What was the sentence referring to? What later statements helped clarify or qualify that sentence? What was the author's purpose in that paragraph? Look beyond just the words themselves to see what else you might need to know in order to answer the question.