What???
Started by
andreaskormusis
· started 2020-08-21 17:38
· last activity 2020-08-22 00:18
· 2 replies
What does any of this mean? What is the question here? What???????
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shunhe
· 2020-08-21 20:10
Hi @andreaskormusis,
Thanks for the question! Honestly, it also sums up my life very well (at least the “What does any of this mean?” and “What????”). And gave me a good throwback to the beginnings of my studies too. Let’s take this bit by bit, starting with the stimulus.
So we have M saying that it’s almost impossible to find a person between 85 and 90 years old who primarily uses their left hand. So sounds like left-handed people between 85-90 years old is a pretty rare phenomenon.
Then Q comes back and says that 70-90 years ago, children were punished for using their left hands to eat/write and had to use their right hands.
Are these two statements linked? Well, seems like those children from 70-90 years ago would probably be the 85-90 year olds now. So sounds like there’s a connection there.
The question’s now asking us to see how we can use what Q says to counter M if M claims to do one of the following answer choices. So what could Q be providing an alternative explanation for? Well, imagine M says that “right-handed people must just live longer because of genetics” or something like that. That’s a reasonable hypothesis to make based on the evidence that M says. But what Q says counters that, right? Because Q is basically saying it’s not that there are way fewer left-handed people who made it to old age, it’s just that they all got forced to be right-handed when they were kids. So Q would counter M if M says that it’s some survival advantage of being right-handed that lets those old people be primarily right handed. And that’s what (A) tells us: that if M tried to support the hypothesis that being born right-handed confers a survival advantage, what Q says would counter that by providing an alternative explanation.
Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.
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andreaskormusis
· 2020-08-22 00:18
So in the question I'm supposed to figure out what that response from Q would make sense towards? Like i guess i can see it because the rest all work, but that one is so far from the question that i would never understand it. Is this one of those bizzaro formats?
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