Science and practical experience clearly show that we cannot care

Question

Science and practical experience clearly show that we cannot care for every individual wild tiger. Animal lovers and conservationists should focus on saving the species as a whole rather than worry about saving every individual. Conservation interventions must therefore be guided by scientific evidence and social practicality, rather than emotion.

Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the conclusion ?

A. There are so few tigers left that it would not be difficult or impractical to care for every single one of them
B. When a species is down to just a handful of members, then saving the whole species would entail for caring for each individual as well.
C. It is difficult to get ordinary people interested in conserving endangered species without appealing to their emotions.
D. The reason that animal lovers and conversationalists try to help endangered animals is that they feel emotionally attached to these animals.
E. Many animals parks are dependent on scientific data to focus on park's animals.

u1983 · Answer

D. Correct. The conservationists & animal lovers feels emotionally attached--> they help endangered species.
 If they would have acted only by scientific evidence and social practicality , they might not have felt attached and thus would have tried to help the endengered species.

Makesh89 · Answer

This is one question that needs one to locate the conclusion Inorder to successfully get the question right.

Posted from my mobile device

Pratyaksh1907 · Answer

Please correct the spelling of conservationist in the argument. It might create confusion and cost extra time to solve. Thank you

bb · Answer

Done. Thx. 🙏
It was an annoying and somewhat funny typo

bb · Answer

B) When a species is down to just a handful of members, then saving the whole species would entail for caring for each individual as well.

The reason OA is not B is 2 fold:

1. We have to weaken the conclusion which happens to be the last sentence:   Conservation interventions must     therefore     be guided by scientific evidence and social practicality, rather than emotion.  Therefore sort of gives it away and B does not deal with this sentence.

2. Even if we argue about the overall argument, the details are a bit longer. Weakening something entails breaking the argument (strong weaken) or casting doubt (subtle weaken). 
In this case, it is telling us that in some case, an edge case, where there are just a few individual left, we would be caring for them but that's a by product of the situation, meaning you will be forced to care for them individually just because there are so few, not because that's the right thing to do but just out of necessity, so the result may be the same but for the wrong reason.

As the result, we did not weaken the argument. The argument still stands and we did not weaken the conclusion either.

P.S. In absence of other weakeners, this could pass up as a subtle weakener, very subtle but not in this case where D is stronger and D actually addresses the conclusion.

Pratyaksh1907 · Answer

B. When a species is down to just a handful of members, then saving the whole species would entail for caring for each individual as well.

nitish2007

why not b??

From the context of the argument we can figure out that tiger species is endangered, otherwise why it required saving in the first place?

Now, from B, we know that the species is down to a handful of members. [In context of option B, not in context of the argument]

Focus on this, HANDFUL ≠ ENDANGERED.
10, 100, 1000 or 3000 can be considered as endangered and same goes for Handful, but the thing is that we don't know the previous numbers of Tigers before being endangered. Hence, we should not make any assumptions on # of handful or # of endangered tigers.
Therefore, we can eliminate B.
This might not be the OE's logic, but this is how I eliminated B.
Hope it helps...

shanalshekhar · Answer

Is option C not correct b/c it says, "ordinary people" and option D say "animal lovers and conversationalists" as is mentioned in Q stem?

Bunuel · Answer

The question is not good. Archiving it.

Science and practical experience clearly show that we cannot care

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