#2- Anthropologist: One of the distinctive traits of humans

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Strengthen. The correct answer choice is (D).

Answer choice (A):

Answer choice (B):

Answer choice (C):

Answer choice (D): This is the correct answer choice.

Answer choice (E):

This explanation is still in progress. Please post any questions below!

[mokkyukkyu]

I eliminated the other questions to arrive at D but still a bit not sure why D is correct...Does this answer connects premise to premise instead of connecting conclusion to premise?
In the stimulus "getting more calories from less food" and in D it says "use more calories to process raw food than it uses to process cooked food".
One is get more calories, and the other is use more calories...I thought they are different.

[Adam Tyson]

Answer D helps support the conclusion, which is that cooking probably made it possible for humans to develop large brains despite our small guts. Your answer needs to focus on cooking, and how cooking could have made this possible. Answer D does this by telling us that we use less calories when we eat (process) cooked food, so our net gain in calories would be greater when we eat cooked food than when we eat the same quantity of raw food. Think of it as being about fuel efficiency (because it is). If eating raw food uses up more calories than eating cooked food, cooking would allow us to get more calories from less food (or at least, more calories from the same quantity of food).

[cnoury1221]

Hello,

Is C incorrect because of the "similar" point in that answer choice? In that way C does not strengthen the conclusion on cooking? Perhaps C has no effect on the stimulus?

Thank you!
Carolyn

[James Finch]

Hi C Noury,

Yes, the issue with (C) is that it actually weakens the causal connection we're trying to strengthen, which is that cooking food leads to obtaining more net calories from that food. There are two ways that this can happen: cooked food has more calories or cooked food requires less expenditure of calories by the body to process. (D) gives us the second possibility, making it correct. With (C), getting the same number of calories would weaken the causal link as without more calories there is no reason to believe cooking food would lead to larger brains.

Hope this clears things up!