#8 - Must Be True, Except

[Dana D]

Hey lemonade,

Both passages specifically mention that clay is part of drilling muds. "Important" here might mean more along the lines of "substantial quantity", but also just that it is necessary to what makes a drilling mud a drilling mud. Consider if you were listing the ingredients for a traditional birthday cake - flour is an important ingredient in the sense that you cannot make a cake without it (generally).

Even if we narrowed these answers down to (A) and (E), there is no support for answer (E) compared to (A), so we should feel comfortable selecting (A) over (E).

[RevDrSaari]

Do these sort of "compromise" questions arise a lot? I think my fear of selecting A is based in bringing outside information into the situation. It may be that having practiced this question, I will be on guard for it when I take the real test, but I am curious about the possible frequency.

[Jeff Wren]

Hi RevDrSaari,

If by "compromise" questions you mean questions that ask for which answer is supported or most strongly supported by the passage(s) rather than a standard must be true/directly appears in the passage, then unfortunately the answer is yes. This is a trend in the reading comprehension section.

To be clear, you do not need any outside information to answer this question.

For Answer A, since Passage A states that "drilling muds are made of bentonite and other clays and polymers" (lines 12-13), this provides support that clay is generally an important ingredient of drilling muds. Even though the word "important" doesn't appear in the passage here, generally when only a few ingredients are listed, they would be presumed to be the main or key ingredients. In other words, if there were other, more important ingredients than bentonite and other clays (and the clays were not really important), then this sentence in the passage wouldn't really make much sense.