#17 - Global Reference, Must Be True

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below!

[tomthomse@gmail.com]

Hi, could you explain why A isn't correct? The sentence in Passage A containing "despite what appears to be a persistent practice of joke stealing among stand-up comedians" to me indicates comedians have more intellectual property theft than chefs, which has no mention of rate of theft.

[Christen Hammock]

Hi Tom!

We never get a one-to-one comparison between comedians and chefs, so we can't infer that intellectual property violations are more frequent among one or the other group! An inference is something that must be true. Your explanation of Answer Choice (A) tells us something that could be true, but we don't have enough evidence to support it!

Christen

[andrewb22]

I chose (E) on this one, but I struggled between it and (C), specifically because of this line "Legal protections are potentially available via trade secrecy laws". Passage A does mention that there are legal avenues for comedians, but that they are expensive and difficult to win. The line I mentioned in Passage B is followed by the fact that chef's rarely use this method, but do not explain why. After considering (C), I thought that lack of explanation implied chef's possibly have an easier path to legal success.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi Andrew,

The key here is that we just don't know enough about how the legal options compare. We know they both have legal options (copyright and trade secrets) but we don't know which one has better options. The passages aren't written to the other author--the authors are unaware of one another. So unless we had an explicit comparison in one or the other, or an objective way of quantifying the legal options, we don't have any way to compare the options available to chefs and comedians.

Hope that helps!

[miriamson07]

Hello,

I did choose E for this question, but I feel it is not entirely accurate to say chefs derive professional benefit from following social norms. To be exact, I think that Passage B shows that when one chef follows the social norms, the chef on the other side receives the benefit.

Take for instance the first norm, which states "a chef must not copy another chef's recipe innovation exactly. The function of this norm is analogous to patenting in that the community acknowledges the right of a recipe inventor to exclude others from practicing his or her invention." One chef would follow the norm of not copying the other chef's recipe. But the one who benefits is technically the chef who owns the recipe, not the chef who followed the norm. The same concept would apply to the second and third norms.

Is answer choice E correct because we'd assume that by following social norms, a chef would become part a system where other chefs would also follow the same norms, thereby eventually becoming a beneficiary?

Please let me know. Thank you!