#14 - Early urban societies could not have been maintained

[Leela]

I had initially chosen C, but then second guessed my answer because the first sentence talks about early urban societies. Are we to assume that the early urban societies did not necessarily take place during early times generally?

[Adam Tyson]

"Early times" is pretty vague, Leela, so I would be wary of assuming anything about what that means or what time period it covers. However, the answer also talks about urban societies. If there were urban societies in early times (whatever and whenever those are), I think it's safe to say that those would classify as "early urban societies." They certainly wouldn't be "recent urban societies" or "modern urban societies" or "late urban societies" if they were in those nebulous "early times", right? So yes, you can assume that urban societies in early times were "early urban societies."

If the urban societies in early times were thus early urban societies, and if those societies required large scale farming,which required irrigation, which required being near a river or lake, then those societies had to be near a river or lake. If they were not, then they would not be maintained (a contrapositive of the whole conditional chain).

Good job selecting C in the first place! When you second-guessed, what answer did you feel was a better choice with more support from the stimulus? Don't switch answers just because you aren't totally fond of the first one you picked. You should only switch if another answer is, in your view, clearly better than your original choice. If there isn't one that is clearly better, keep that first pick.

[Jenmstearns]

Hi there,

I diagrammed this and arrived at the correct answer, but one of the sentences tripped me up and I’m still not sure how to diagram it. In this case, it looks like it was meant to be a distraction element, but in case it should ever be relevant, I would like to know how it would fit in.

My diagram was: early urban societies large scale farming irrigation NOTfar from rivers

I ended up just sticking a “NOTforaging” at the beginning of the chain but it doesn’t quite seem to belong there. Where does it go?

Additionally, I’m wondering now if I just got lucky with where I diagrammed “NOTfar from rivers”, since maybe it should have been somewhere else entirely as “far from rivers recent times” ? Or is the way I have it an acceptable contrapositive (ish) of the part of the chain that is “early times NOTfar from rivers”?

[KelseyWoods]

Hi Jen!

Your arrow diagram there looks good, including the part with "far from rivers" at the end. The stimulus basically tells us that early urban societies needed large-scale farming, which needed irrigation, which (at the time) needed to not be far from rivers or lakes. That's a great diagram to arrive at correct answer choice (C).

That middle sentence is not actually specific to foraging--that's just an example of methods of food acquisition besides large-scale farming. So if I was going to diagram that middle sentence, I would actually diagram it as:

large-scale farming maintain early urban societies

That's really just the contrapositive of your first statement so it isn't actually adding any new information to our contrapositive chain.

In general, however, you may sometimes encounter conditional statements that do not connect to your other conditional statements, or that at least don't connect in a way that allows you to make any inferences between conditions. So be careful not to assume that just because you have an extra conditional statement that it must fit at the beginning or the end of your chain. Sometimes it's just extra information that doesn't give you any inferences.

Hope this helps!

Best,
Kelsey

[Jenmstearns]

Thanks so much, Kelsey!