Helium wrote:
People with Williams syndrome, a genetic condition that causes physical health problems and intellectual disability, are often highly articulate and sociable. Not uncommonly, they are gifted in music, possess rich vocabularies, and do well at tasks involving memorization. Yet historically, psychologists and educators often placed these individuals, because of their lack of aptitude for basic arithmetic and difficulty in distinguishing left from right, in the same category as people with uniformly limited cognitive abilities and no specialized aptitudes. As evaluated by conventional means, such as IQ tests, the intelligence of people with Williams syndrome and similar autism spectrum disorders is rarely above average and is often well below average, despite subjects' wide range of abilities.
The statements above, if true, most strongly support which of the following conclusions?
A) Conventional methods of measuring intelligence, such as IQ tests, are inadequate for evaluating people with certain intellectual disabilities.
B) Some people with intellectual disabilities have less verbal and musical ability, but more mathematical and spatial ability, than do people with Williams syndrome.
C) Conventional methods of measuring intelligence, such as IQ tests, tend to consider basic mathematical and spatial ability more important than verbal and musical skills.
D) Society loses the benefit of the musical and verbal abilities of people with Williams syndrome because these abilities are often not measured accurately.
E) With specially designed educational interventions, people with Williams syndrome can develop their mathematical and spatial skills.
Type : Conclusion
Author's Conclusion: Well, Not so much. You can make out that the author is not in favor of how people with syndrome are being evaluated but he does not explicitly take a stand or anything.
A) Conventional methods of measuring intelligence, such as IQ tests, are inadequate for evaluating people with certain intellectual disabilities.
Imagine this. You read the paragraph and now you have to tell your friend a one liner summary what would you do? This is what you would say "Author basically tells me what the people with intellectual disabilities are good and bad at but it also tells me that our conventional method of IQ is not sufficient to evaluate them. That's it. There is your answer.B) Some people with intellectual disabilities have less verbal and musical ability, but more mathematical and spatial ability, than do people with Williams syndrome.
First, the author says people with syndrome are good at verbal and music. Second, I would not want to bring other people into the conclusion. C) Conventional methods of measuring intelligence, such as IQ tests, tend to consider basic mathematical and spatial ability more important than verbal and musical skills.
Do we know what IQ test considers? Have majority of us even taken an IQ test? Besides if the author is talking about people with a syndrome why would you want to conclude about what IQ test does in real life? D) Society loses the benefit of the musical and verbal abilities of people with Williams syndrome because these abilities are often not measured accurately.
We, as a society, do I feel. But author does not touch upon this.E) With specially designed educational interventions, people with Williams syndrome can develop their mathematical and spatial skills.
We have no idea about what education can do to such people.Thank you!