Question Stem

Hello @acarrera, This is a lot like a "parallel reasoning" question from the LR section. It is asking you to take a concept from the passage, and apply it to totally different scenario. Your ability to do this will be tested frequently. A key word here is "applicable." In this case, we are applying the reasoning behind the author's objection to one hypothesis to a different hypothesis. Now that we understand the question a bit better, let's look at the passage. We need to identify the elements from the question stem. The second hypothesis is the "asteroid-impact hypothesis." How does the author object to this? She says on line 59, "theories that depend on extraterrestrial intervention seem less convincing than theories like the first..." Therefore, we want to look for an answer that involves "extraterrestrial intervention." The only thing that matches this is the comet from answer choice E.

If you are struggling to understand what the question is asking, I would start by identifying the specific elements from the text that are mentioned in the question stem. You may also have noticed that the answer choices were all various hypotheses. The author's objection was not a complicated one. It simply mentioned "extraterrestrial intervention," but the superficial link between this and answer choice E was all we needed to answer the question correctly.