Hi
oasis90Here are the two sentences we need:
the sentence announcing the main idea:
Quote:
What is striking about these lizards is not that coexisting species differ in morphology and habitat use (such differences are common among closely related sympatric species), but that the same three types of habitat specialists occur on each of four islands: Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hispaniola, and Jamaica.
and the very last sentence, which gives us the resolution to the mystery announced earlier:
Quote:
DNA evidence concerning the anoles led researchers to conclude that habitat specialists on one island are not closely related to the same habitat specialists elsewhere, indicating that specialists evolved independently on each island.
When I read the passage and I got to the topic sentence, I said out loud here in my living room, "ooh, how did they get there? hmm!" And then I wondered in my head if Puerto Rico and the neighboring islands were all once connected like a mini-Pangaea or something. OK, I couldn't have said anything out loud in the testing center, but I surely would have said it to myself mentally. Here is the mystery, the drama of our passage.
And then at the end, almost surprisingly,
we actually get an answer to the question that was posed. That's a little unusual - often GMAT leaves us hanging. But since we get an answer, that's important to note ... just like we should note if the author decides to take a side or declare a winner in an argument where he has spent most of the passage explaining the two sides.
So my summarized main idea is "there was a mystery about how these same types of lizards got distributed so similarly across 4 islands that are, well, islands, there were some theories about how that happened, and at the end some scientists were able to settle on one of the theories."
So, in E, there are two problems. Yes, "trait" is wrong - a trait would be like they all have grey eyes. A trait isn't what we have here at all ... we have a particular pattern of species distribution across islands. But the other problem is that E is neutral and this isn't actually a neutral passage: at the end we actually get told which theory was proven correct. That's crucial information and the main idea answer must reflect that.
Let me know if that clears it up.