#2 - Concept Reference, Must Be True, Except

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below!

[haganskl]

Hello.
During blind review I chose the correct answer. The passage cites 14000 settlements in the civilization. It only mentions people moving around after potential causes of the decline in civilization. Ok. Got it.

However, timed, I was stuck between A & C. I chose A. I chose A because the passage never tells me that Sumer & Egypt are URBAN civilizations. It tells me that Indus Valley was the largest URBAN civilization, even bigger than phaoric Egypt but thats it. That is why I chose A. Can you please help me understand how I should have eliminated answer choice A?

TIA

[Robert Carroll]

haganskl,

Can I turn that around first? What basis was there for thinking the people nomadic? In order to choose answer choice (A), you'd have to think that answer choice (C) made a claim that was in the passage. But there is 0 basis for that answer. There is some, possibly questionable, basis for answer choice (A)'s claim. That really should be enough to decide the matter - a shaky basis is infinitely better than a completely absent basis.

If we want a positive reason why answer choice (A) is a true statement, from the first two sentences it seems that "major early Bronze Age civilization" is a subset of " ancient urban civilization" from the author's perspective. The author even talks about Egypt in the second sentence, its second mention, when talking about how the Indus Valley civilization is the geographically largest such civilization, seeming to indicate that Egypt was urban as well. It's a reasonable assumption to think Sumer was probably urban also, if anything.

Robert Carroll