#18- Zoologist: Every domesticated large mammal species now

[Brook Miscoski]

Erica,

Generally you just need to be attentive to leaps and topic shifts during a stimulus. Your pre phrase doesn't need to be exactly the same as anyone else's. Here, we were talking about what was worthwhile in the past but made a conclusion about the present. That's a shift that needs to be addressed, and simply stating that leads you to (B). Your pre phrase does not need to be any more specific than that.

[beeryslurs]

Hi, I have a question about answer choice B.

If we negate B, it will follow that it is much easier to domesticate large wild animals today than in the past. But I don't see how this would hurt the argument, because the stimulus provides that "since those days, people undoubtedly tried innumerable times to domesticate each of the wild large mammal species that seemed worth domesticating." Doesn't this mean that people today also tried domesticating some large wild animals worthy of domesticating too, but probably without success even if it's much easier today? I think this still shows that some large animals are just hard to domesticate and therefore remain wild.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Adam Tyson]

The stimulus tells us enough to know that people have, at some point in the past, tried and failed to domesticate some large mammal species, beeryslurs. The author uses that information to conclude that most of the wild ones we have now are either difficult to domesticate or else not worth domesticating. But it tells us nothing about people today - maybe it has been hundreds of years since we last tried to domesticate a species of large mammal? What if it has gotten a lot easier to domesticate some of them? What if we have new techniques and technologies that would allow us to very easily domesticate, say, a moose, or a rhinoceros? And what if that greater ease would make the effort worthwhile? Think of it as a cost/benefit analysis - it might not have been worthwhile to domesticate a rhino in the past because the cost of doing so was very high compared to whatever benefit we would get, but now that the cost is much lower (it's easier) the benefits of doing so would outweigh that lower cost?

In short, if it is easier now than it used to be, then maybe now something that was not previously worth the effort has become worthwhile. Let's throw a saddle on that rhino! The author has to believe that is not true.

[geremia19]

Hi Power Score Staff,

I've read through all the discussions in this forum concerning why B is the correct answer but I am still not convinced. My doubt hinges on the fact that if we negate the assumption and it turns into "It is much easier to domesticate large mammal species than it was in the past," then the conclusion could still follow.

If it was impossible to domesticate large mammal species in the past then "much easier" could mean very difficult today, which would not undermine the conclusion. Please help me understand why my logic is wrong here.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for another answer choice. When I was blind reviewing this question I recognized that all other answer choices (A, C, D, E) were worse, so I through up my hands and chose B, but I wasn't happy about it because I'm not convinced "much easier" is a robust enough negation. We simply don't know how hard it was to domesticate animals thousands of years ago, so "much easier" could still mean difficult.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi geremia19,

First, great job eliminating wrong answer choices here. That's half the battle. On test day, you don't really need to care why an answer is right if you are confident you eliminated the other four answer choices.

But let's look at what we have here. Our stimulus suggests that all large domestic animals were domesticated thousands of years ago, which the author suggests must mean that the current wild animals were either too hard to domesticate or weren't worth the trouble. However, if somehow things were different in the past than they are now, we couldn't necessarily draw that conclusion. Even if the difference was between impossible to domesticate to very hard to domesticate, that difference would still be significant enough to make the conclusion not follow. We can't conclude that the reason for the lack of domestication is that it IS too hard if the difficulty has changed over time.

Hope that helps!

[yenisey]

"Because there is no “rogue” information in the conclusion". Isn't the "would be difficult to domesticate" a rogue element??! I thought that was the new element in the conclusion since it's not mentioned in the premises

[Luke Haqq]

Hi yenisey!

It's not quite a rouge element; although some new words are used ("difficult to domesticate" and not "worth domesticating"), they are just variations on the theme of domestication, which is discussed in the premises.

Did your inclination to see this as introducing rogue elements lead you to an incorrect answer choice? If you want to embellish on why you selected the answer you did, we'd be happy to unpack why an incorrect answer choice is wrong or why the right answer choice is correct.