Can someone chime in on how best to distinguish between strengthening questions and inference? I get thrown off by the stems...
Duckbill dinosaurs, like today's monitor lizards, had particularly long tails, which they could whip at considerable speed. Monitor lizards use their tails to strike predators. However, although duckbill tails were otherwise very similar to those of monitor lizards, the duckbill's tailbones were proportionately much thinner and thus more delicate. Moreover, to ward off their proportionately much larger predators, duckbills would have had to whip their tails considerably faster than monitor lizards do.
The information given, if accurate, provides the strongest support for which of the following hypotheses?
A. If duckbills whipped their tails faster than monitor lizards do, the duckbill's tail would have been effective at warding off the duckbills' fiercest predators.
-effectiveness is nowhere in site…we don’t have the slightest clue whether it would be effective or not
-the fact that they whip it at considerable SPEED is not a sign of effectiveness
B. Duckbills used their tails to strike predators, and their tailbones were frequently damaged from the impact.
-the first part of this choice is what makes it wrong: the passage expresses uncertainty about whether the duckbills do in fact use their tails to ward off predators…
-can we infer that their tailbones were frequently damaged? Possibly since we know it is more delicate..
-however, the main issue is that first part
C. Using their tails was not the only means duckbills had for warding off predators.
-there’s nothing to suggest that they do have other means of doing so
D. Duckbills were at much greater risk of being killed by a predator than monitor lizards are.
-no…this is a silly inference…suppose the duckbill didn’t even have a tail…it could certainly evade predators in other ways
E. The tails of duckbills, if used to ward off predators, would have been more likely than the tails of monitor lizards to sustain damage from the impact.
-Correct…notice the conditional ‘if’ …we don’t actually know if the duckbill dinosaurs used their tail to ward off predators
-their tails are also ‘more delicate’ compared to the tail of the lizard…so it’s reasonable to infer that it’s more likely to sustain damage
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