#20 - For pollinating certain crops such as cranberries,

[Robert Carroll]

lsatquestions,

"Certain" is precisely a restriction on the species talked about, not a blanket statement about all of them.

Compare:

"Everyone needs iron supplements to be healthy."

"Certain people need iron supplements to be healthy."

The first statement is clearly about everyone, but the second statement is surely not about everyone. The second statement does not specify the range of application (maybe pregnant women would be the certain people? People with bleeding disorders who need extra iron? Who knows?), but it's definitely restricting the range of application of the statement by using the word "certain".

Robert Carroll

[DaveWave24]

I'm having a really hard time accepting B as the correct answer choice here. We are given that the effect of bumblebees being more efficient is caused by their visiting only a few plant species in a limited area. Both the area and the number of species are contrasted with the other bee species. From the other replies it seems like we are supposed link the two concepts of area and number of species into one causal mechanism, but I believe these are two distinct concepts. It looks like there should be three possible explanations:

1. Only the size of the area affects the efficiency
2. Only the number of species affects the efficiency
3. Both the size of the area and the number of species affect the efficiency

In order for answer choice B to be strongly supported, we would need at least some indication of why 1 is not the causal explanation, because to me explanation 1 seems perfectly logical- maybe the bees get tired from flying around. If we cannot conclude a causal relationship between number of species and efficiency then we cannot use the word "affects" in the way that answer choice B does. I think the answer would be valid if we swapped "affects" for "is correlated with", but that would give it a completely different meaning. Please let me know what I'm missing here.

[Jeff Wren]

Hi Dave,

I definitely understand where you are coming from in your reasoning.

The problem is that this is a Most Strongly Supported question, which follows the Must Be True/Prove category of questions requiring us to accept the information in the stimulus as true and use it to support our answer.

Here, when the author states that the bumblebee is more efficient than the honeybee because the bumblebee does two things (specifically, it visits only a few plants and stays in a limited area) and the honeybee does not do those two things (it does the opposite of those two things, in fact), we need to accept that both of those "things" mentioned matter. In other words, the way the stimulus is worded, it is saying that number 3 of your options is what is happening. The author didn't say, "well it's either A or B, but we aren't sure which."