- Posts: 33
- Joined: Sep 04, 2025
- Wed Oct 01, 2025 9:15 am
#121731
Luke Haqq wrote: ↑Mon Nov 07, 2022 9:00 pm Hi oq058420!How is E not even spoken about. It says most from that time period are only Limestone. Surely E strengthens by increasing odds of the building being built with external resources, therefore strengthening the conclusion?
I can certainly address why answer choice (B) is correct. The numbers you provided in your hypotheticals seemed to make sense to me in skimming them and looking at the premises in the stimulus. One thing missing from your post was the variable of "occur[ring] naturally in the area," which seems to be key to why answer choice (B) is correct.
The conclusion is, "Therefore, the building we are studying probably was not a dwelling." How does the author arrive at this? The author notes that the building is made from 3 different types of stone, but only 1 of them is found naturally in the area. The author seems to make an inference that the presence of the other 2 types of stone indicates that it's not a dwelling, but if so, this isn't stated.
In addition to the numerical hypotheticals you suggested, you might also find it helpful to think of the middle two sentences of the stimulus in terms of a Venn diagram, or something similar--there'd be one encompassing circle for "buildings," one within it covering more than half for "dwellings," and the same amount for "limestone." Since they both cover more than half, those inner two circles overlap, i.e., we know that there are some dwellings are made from limestone.
Answer choice (B) states, "Most of the buildings at the site that were not dwellings were made, at least in part, from types of stone that do not occur naturally in the area." This connects the sentence about not being from the area to the conclusion. It makes sense to conclude from the types of stone it is made out of--which included stones not from the area--that this building is not a dwelling if, as (B) supposes, most non-dwellings utilized stones that were not from the area.