Guide 7, Ch 7, page 96, question 6

[joyoftheheart]

The question: "Select the sentence that names the mechanism by which a seemingly conscious behavior can be proven autonomic?"
The given answer: the one mentioning "interference".

My quandary: how is interference a mechanism?? Interference could be a procedure, a strategy, a method, an approach, a tactic... by which a conscious agent - scientist, does something creatively so to learn something new. It's not a mechanism in the sense of a fixed, robotic routine.

In this question I was thrown off by the word "mechanism", and so answering the question became impossible, even after a long deliberation. Then, since the question asks for something "named", the only other sentence where something gets named is the very first sentence (and it's a mechanism that gets named there) although it didn't make too much of a sense, so anyway I opted for that one.. incorrectly.

Can the word "mechanism" in English mean anything else but a robotic, predetermined, automatic, set of events?

[joyoftheheart]

I'll conflate the question above with a similar one I just found further on in the same book:

Guide 7, Ch 8, page 152, question 7

C: Allow for a cleaner stroke than a ball striking a racket's primary sweet spot

This is supposedly correct answer. However, what is missing is the explanation of what it means to have a "clean" stroke. I do agree that hitting the ball at the center of percussion will cause no jerk, while hitting at the other sweet spot will cause some jerk, but how is this related to the concept of "cleanness" of the stroke?

The question seems to assume that jerkless=clean, but that is not mentioned anywhere - I guess I would have to follow tennis to know that jargon. The main sweet spot is also sweet, so it does something good too... maybe it delivers cleanness in some other way besides avoiding the jerk?

[joyoftheheart]

Continuing down the book, another example of English verbiage making me choose a wrong answer, not a fault in logic..

Guide 7, Ch 9, page 183, question 1.

Passage: "...John was positive he would make his connecting flight thirty minutes later, because _______".

From the passage, one is supposed to figure that the problem is in Chicago airport being too large (although this is nowhere mentioned as a problem or something to worry about), so the right answer should address that: in and out flights are on the same terminal, choice C.

However, I thought that the point is in 30 minutes, the number. What if in 30 minutes there is no plane, they are often late anyhow? So my answer addressed that: the airline is known to be always on time, choice A. Who would think that 30 minutes is not enough to move around O'Hare once pass security checkpoints?

My point here: it seem to me that to answer this question one needs something beyond just logic or just plain English, something cultural, which is too hard for international non-native speakers. Agree?