Q16 - An ancient Pavonian text describes

[tamwaiman]

I cannot distinguish (B) with (E).
Since the students mistakenly concluded a cause because of the true effect. Both (B) and (E) point out this causal mistake.
Please help me, thank you.

[maryadkins]

We're told:

(1) A text describes an army that drank a lake dry
(2) Recently it was discovered that there wasn't water-based wildlife after this event
(3) Students confirmed (2), and based on that, decided (1) was true

(E) captures this: since the evidence in (2) is true (water-based life was gone), (1) must be correct about the cause of it (the army drank up the water)

(A) is incorrect because the argument isn't about multiple historical events. It's just about one.

(B) is incorrect because we aren't given any counterevidence. What counterevidence or they ignoring?

(C) is incorrect because the hypothesis isn't rejected.

(D) is incorrect because the argument isn't based on modern historians but on archeologists.

[shaynfernandez]

I choose because I saw it as the "least correct" I know in arguments framed like this implicit causality is often an answer choice but I just don't see where the students believe one thing caused another... All the passage says is that based on the text and based on the evidence the students believed that the events took place. Where do get that they believed that the soldiers drank all the water causing all this fish to die?

[maryadkins]

Think about it this way: What would be the basis of the students believing that (1) was true based on (2) if it weren't a causal relationship? They'd have no link. Their only possible link is causal, which is why there is, as you say well, implicit causation.

I'm not sure which answer choice you chose (and why you were choosing the least correct? Maybe you mistyped here?), but this is why the causation is okay in E.

[uhdang]

I was doubtful for E) because I thought disappearance of water-based life form doesn't necessarily indicate dry lake. So, when I work on the reasoning process, it looked like this:

E) "Text has correctly described as an effect ( here, while the conclusion claims for "dry lake", premise doesn't explicitly states but just talks about "disappearance of water-based life form." Although I could have speculated "dry lake" from "disappearance", I thought this was a pretty valid gap and thought that this whole sentence points out something subtly different, so I thought this part was wrong.) to show that the text has correctly described the cause (enemies drank them all)."

The last part DOES state the conclusion. But there seem to be a pretty huge gap in this answer choice and this really made me stretch my reasoning to make sense of it. Isn't is a bit too much stretch to consider it as a working assumption to connect “disappearance of water-based life” to “dry lake.”? Considering other assumption questions, I think it's pretty well-prepared spot for an assumption.

[maryadkins]

Yes, there's a shift between dry lake and lack of water-based life in (E). Good catch! In this case it's still the best answer. It works better than the others, if imperfectly.

Keep it up, your thinking is correct.