Test #40 (June 2003) Section 1 #11 Forum

[mandrewsf]

The correct answer is A, but I had my reservations and picked D instead. Here is my reasoning:

A seems like a strong answer, but to me, it looked a bit like "correlation implying causation"; just because the supposedly "rare" rocks are found on the coasts of South America and Africa does not mean they're not found elsewhere. If the answer is phrased similar to "A large band of ancient rock of a rare type is only found along the east coast of South America and on the west coast of Africa," then I would have picked this answer without hesitation.

B, C, and E were obvious incorrect, so I did not consider them.

D at a glance looks similar to B, but B is incorrect because plenty of people today living in Brazil are descendants of African slaves, and the answer does not consider at all transmigration that occurred during the historical period. D goes deeper, however, and find similarities between the most ancient aborigines in South America who could not have possibly been transported from Africa by, say, slave traders, and the people living in West Africa. Of course, outside of the LSAT context, we know that humans moved to the Americas long after the separation of Africa and South America, but given the extent of the information presented in the stimulus, I felt that D was a stronger answer overall than A.

Can someone explain to me why A is stronger than D? Is it because it is the only answer that mentions geology? If so, is my concern about A valid, or is it superfluous and I'm just over thinking the problem?

Thanks!

[Rhymes With Wolf]

You might want to edit your post, I think there's a policy against using the questions and answers verbatim.

Most strongly supports is simply a strengthen; our burden isn't to prove that the two landmasses were, in fact, connected, just strengthen the likelihood that they were. Look at the argument. Conclusion: we hypothesize continent 1 and continent 2 were once connected. Why? According to the theory, many separate contents were once connected before they broke apart.

A. Speaks directly to the likelihood of the landmasses themselves having been connected.
D. Is much weaker. It doesn't speak directly to the continents themselves being connected, which is all we have to go off of in the stimulus. Maybe the people just interacted after the split, or maybe similar languages started independent of contact, or maybe even aliens.

[mandrewsf]

Thanks for both the policy update and the answer!