#16 - Zoos have served both as educational resources

[LSAT2018]

How does answer (D) compare with the correct answer (B)?
From the stimulus ('Today most zoo animals are obtained from captive breeding') I found answer (D) to be quite similar.

Can I also get an explanation for the inference made in (B)?


Thanks in advance!

[Adam Tyson]

Thanks for the question, LSAT2018! The problem in answer D is the leap from Most (which means more than half) to "nearly all" (which is very subjective, but almost certainly requires a much higher threshold than the 50% plus 1 that meets the minimum requirement for "most"). Also, in answer D we hear about animals that are IN zoos today, but the captive breeding program is about the NEW animals in zoos. Perhaps zoos today still remain full of animals that have been there a while and were born and captured in the wild? Maybe only 1% of all animals currently in zoos were born in captivity, even though most NEW animals in zoos (which I understand to mean newly arrived individual animals, rather than indicating species that were not previously represented) were bred in captivity? The new arrivals could still represent only a tiny fraction of the total. We have an elephant here in L.A., Billy, who has been in the zoo for about 30 years!

Answer B is a lot easier to defend, with the mild language of "some" (which means "at least one", not much of a threshold to get over). If it is true that the program for breeding in captivity is helping the effort to reestablish endangered species in the wild, it's not much of a leap to presume that at least some of the animals being bred are members of endangered species. Otherwise, why would they matter to those efforts? Would a program for breeding house cats have an impact on endangered snow leopards?

What it comes down to is that answer D is much too tenuous, and requires too many leaps and assumptions, than answer B, which is supported just by the info provided with no outside help required. That makes B the better answer, and the correct one.

[dbrowning]

This question gave me a lot of trouble, and I ended up choosing answer D. I noticed the potential issue with older animals still living in zoos, though I thought the mention of the "earliest" zoos taking animals from their habitat was meant to dispel this concern. With respect to answer choice B, just because most new animals in zoos are born in captivity, it does not mean that there is overlap between these animals and endangered animals (what if only a very small percentage of species are endangered?). Furthermore, the stimulus just says that this captivity breeding makes it possible to reestablish endangered species. It does not say that the captivity breeding actually does reestablish endangered species. It is hard to know when these small details actually matter to the test writers and when they do not.

In the end, I think I went with D because of equating 'most' with 'nearly all'. Is there a good rule of thumb for translating 'nearly all'?

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi dbrowning,

Let's start with your last question. Most is 51-100 percent of the time. That's a broad range. It includes the idea of nearly all, but it also includes lesser sums. Terms like nearly all and almost all don't have precise ranges, but it would be a stretch to call 51% nearly all.

From the stimulus, we know that "this" (the breading program in zoos) makes possible efforts to reestablish endangered species in the wild. By connecting the breading program to the efforts to reestablish the endangered species, it means that the breading program has to involve endangered species. Otherwise, the program can't be making possible the efforts to help endangered species. If it only involved non-endangered species, the program wouldn't be able to help the populations of endangered species. That's how we end up at answer choice (B).

Hope that helps!
Rachael

[hbaezh]

After much back and forth I got B but it was not easy.

The way I analyzed it was that A was too forceful, 'Zoo have placed an ESSENTIAL role'. I found this as a CBT, from the stimulus it seems that zoos do play a role but essential.? That came off as too strong

While C is a certain "I hope they do not", at least from the zoos mentioned in this stimulus it seems that do not exploit the animals but what about zoos besides this one? Maybe I was going off scope bringing in other zoos besides the one in the stimulus but I also saw this answer as a CBT?..

The words 'nearly all' in D came off too strong once again and what about those that were rescued in the wild as infants and now live in the zoo?

With E the main purpose of zoos is never mentioned, although the first sentence of the stimulus kinda made this answer appealing since it mentioned education and entertainment. However, I went back and saw how entertainment and education were used and it states that 'zoos have served as BOTH' not that it has shifted from one to another

This was my take on the answer, is my thinking correct?

[Robert Carroll]

hbaezh,

That sounds good, and for you and anyone else reading this, I want to emphasize that careful attention to the degree of certainty of statements in answer choices for Must Be True/Most Strongly Supported questions is vital. The degree of certainty matters as much as the details. In other words, if the content of an answer looks good, but the certainty language exceeds what the stimulus proves, then the answer is out. So you noted that answer choice (B) has the "lowest" level of certainty (some/possibility) and that other answers were wrong in part because of how certain their language was.

Robert Carroll