#2 - Must Be True

[mpoulson]

Hello,

I struggled to see how the large scale climate trends are analogous to the highly complex behavior of a dense mass of ants. Can you help me understand this? I chose A because the simulation of large climate trend necessitated the use many computers working simultaneously.

V/r,

Micah

[Emily Haney-Caron]

Hi Micah,

I think your trouble with this one might have been in ignoring the word "analogous;" here, you're not looking for which thing in Passage B describes or explains the process of finding large-scale climate trends, you're looking for something that functions in the same way. Both the ants and the climate trends are made up of a very high number of individual items. Does that make sense?

[brcibake]

Hi Micah,

I think your trouble with this one might have been in ignoring the word "analogous;" here, you're not looking for which thing in Passage B describes or explains the process of finding large-scale climate trends, you're looking for something that functions in the same way. Both the ants and the climate trends are made up of a very high number of individual items. Does that make sense?

How is A any different? there are thousands of computers just like there are thousands of ants.
Thank you

[Francis O'Rourke]

Hi Brcibake,

This question asks us to find an element in Passage B that is analogous to the large-scale climate trends that Passage A discussed.

Passage A tells us that these trends are a natural phenomenon made up of a large number of variables which each have a range of possible values. The interactions between these variables are highly complex and will yield an extraordinary number of possible results.

From this description, we want to look for something is Passage B that is composed of a large number of connected variables that creating an incredibly large number of possible outcomes.

Answer choice (A) identifies the computers working simultaneously to solve a calculation. The computers as described in Passage B are not creating a great number of possible outcomes but rather are working together to solve a problem like the one described in Passage A.

Answer choice (C) identifies the behavior of a dense mass of ants. The author described this ants as individually "little more than a few neurons strung together by fibers," but together creating something much more complex behavior. The behavior of a dense mass of ants is thus similar to the factors that go into climate trends.

[hassan66]

In A), is the calculation intensive problem analogous to the large scale climate trends? Is A incorrect because the focus is on the thousands of computers which would be analogous to the computer models working to create the climate trend simulation?

Just like in C, the ants aren't necessarily the same as the climate trends, it's the complex behavior that is created when they work together. So if C had said, thousands of ants working to simulate a highly complex behavior that would be wrong bc in that rearrangement, the focus is on the ants and the ants are comparable to the computers. Does that make sense?

[Adam Tyson]

I think "the thousands of computers working simultaneously" is comparable to the large mass of ants, or to the large-scale climate trends, hasan66, rather than to the individual ants or isolated climate variables. It's about the groups, not the individual members of the group. However, for those folks who are drawn to answer A for that reason, consider these two aspects of the computers compared to the climate trends: first, the computers are NOT naturally occurring, but are programmed to do something fixed and predictable. We can determine every aspect of their behavior, because we decide what that behavior will be. The climate variables, like the ants, are somewhat unpredictable. In this way, the collection of computers in answer A is not analogous to the climate trends mentioned in the question.

Second, the behavior of the climate is the problem that we are studying, while the computers are the solution to that problem, or the tool with which we study that problem. We aren't trying to figure out how the computers behave when connected in a group - we are using the computers to help us predict and understand the behavior of the climate, or the ants.

In short, the computers are not analogous to anything else in the passage. We need the thing in Passage B that is a large-scale complex system to be studied using parallel computing. That's why answer A is incorrect - the computers aren't the system to be studied, but the tool used to study that system. The mass of ants is the analogous complex system.