#24 - It is now clear that the ancient Egyptians were the

[Robert Carroll]

ashpine,

The premises provide no basis at all for concluding that most Egyptians consumed alcohol, so I suppose that, if the conclusion were to generalize in that way, this would be an overgeneralization. But this kind of counterfactual reasoning is pretty unhelpful - we're dealing with the stimulus as written.

Robert Carroll

[sofisofi]

Hi,
while i understand the flaw in the argument, I still don't understand why A also cant be a flaw in the argument.
thanks

[Adam Tyson]

The problem with answer A, sofisofi, is that the sample used is not too small to be representative. This isn't a question of "some Egyptians were brewing beer, therefore most Egyptians were brewing beer." Rather, it's evidence that there was at least some brewing going on at that place and time, which could be enough to show that some Egyptians were doing it earlier than the Babylonians 500 years later were.

The first sentence of the argument tells us that "ancient Egyptians were the first" to do this. That only requires one ancient Egyptian to do it, and it doesn't matter if they were representative of any larger group of Egyptians or not!

Here's an analogy which might help:

American astronauts were the first humans to set foot on the moon.

Were those early astronauts a representative sample of all Americans? Not at all - they were a tiny subgroup, 12 test pilots with military backgrounds who were all white and all male. But they were still the first, and the fact that they were an unrepresentative sample does nothing to change the truth of that claim. The same is true of the stimulus: even if only a few Egyptians were brewing beer, it still could be true that they did so before the Babylonians did, even if they were not a representative sample of all Egyptians.