Q17 - Wild cheetahs live in the African

[mchuynh]

Can someone explain to me why is the answer D and not B?

I eliminated D because it stated "in the short term"- I mean we know the wild cheetah population will be incapable of surviving a natural disaster in the African grassland... but it never stated "when" it doesn't have to be in the short term right?

[bbirdwell]

Here are the facts of the argument:
The current population is too little to survive a natural disaster.
There is not enough habitat to support a larger population.

In other words, if there is a natural disaster tomorrow, the cheetahs won't make it. In fact, they won't survive a natural disaster until they get their population numbers up, and since their habitat won't permit that, we can infer that it is very likely that the cheetahs won't be surviving natural disasters any time soon, because changing the habitat sufficiently to allow the populations to grow sufficiently is the kind of thing that's going to take... a while.

Therefore, (D) is the most reasonable choice.

(B) is not supported in any shape or form. We have no information whatsoever regarding the rates at which either the habitat or the cheetah population is decreasing.

[mchuynh]

Thanks!

[peg_city]

Here are the facts of the argument:
The current population is too little to survive a natural disaster.
There is not enough habitat to support a larger population.

In other words, if there is a natural disaster tomorrow, the cheetahs won't make it. In fact, they won't survive a natural disaster until they get their population numbers up, and since their habitat won't permit that, we can infer that it is very likely that the cheetahs won't be surviving natural disasters any time soon, because changing the habitat sufficiently to allow the populations to grow sufficiently is the kind of thing that's going to take... a while.

Therefore, (D) is the most reasonable choice.

(B) is not supported in any shape or form. We have no information whatsoever regarding the rates at which either the habitat or the cheetah population is decreasing.

Can you break down the second sentence in the stimulus for me? I must have read it around 10 times now and still can't figure out what it is saying.

Thanks

[bbirdwell]

The second sentence?

It says "there's not enough grassland for more cheetahs."

"not enough to support a larger population"

Does that help?

[lhermary]

Why is the answer not A?

Second sentence:
'Previous estimate of the size that the wild cheetah population.......were too small'

[bbirdwell]

Tell me why you think it's the answer and I'll tell you where your reasoning is flawed.

[rostov]

Why is the answer not A?

Second sentence:
'Previous estimate of the size that the wild cheetah population.......were too small'

Because you took out a very important part of that sentence when you made it shorter. You took it out of context. That's not at all what the second sentence is saying.

[jgallorealestate]

Here is why "A" is incorrect:

"A" states that "Previous estimates of the size of the existing wild cheetah population were inaccurate."

Here's why I thought it was previously correct:

Passage states that "Previous estimates of the size that the wild cheetah population MUST BE in order for these animals to survive a natural..."

The estimate is about what population MUST BE in order to survive. "A" is about the size of the existing wild cheetah population, not what it must be. Therefore, we don't even know if an estimate was conducted on the size of the existing wild cheetah population.

Hope this helps.

[Ibrahim.diallo]

Is (A) wrong because of the word INACCURATE? my reasoning was that the author says the estimates "were too small" not "inaccurate". Am I being too nit picky in assuming "too small" is different from being "inaccurate"?

[ohthatpatrick]

Knowing an estimate is 'too small' allows you to say it's 'inaccurate'.

If it were accurate, it wouldn't be too small. We wouldn't be able to infer the reverse:
knowing an estimate is 'inaccurate' does NOT allow you to say it's 'too small'. (maybe it's too big)

So that's not the problem with (A). As other posters in the thread noted, the problem with (A) is that the paragraph never spoke about estimating the size of the cheetah population.

It spoke about estimating "the size the cheetah population would need to be to survive a natural disaster in the African grasslands".

Those are two completely different things.

It's kinda like if we read:
"Bernie's estimate for how much money he would need to successfully run for President was too small"

and then picked an answer that said:
"Bernie's estimate for how much money he currently has in his bank account was too small"

One way to be warned that (A) is just a trap answer is that to support it we would just use the first half of the 2nd sentence. We would be picking (A) saying, "Yup, they said that fact."

Make sure you realize that the point of Inference questions is to COMBINE ideas. When you pick your correct answer, 99% of the time you will have to support it by bringing 2 or more ideas together.

To support (D), we pretty much have to integrate the information in all three sentences. That's the sort of thinking they're testing / rewarding on Inference questions. (It doesn't need to bring ALL the facts together like this question, but the correct answer almost always involves bringing at least two ideas together).

== other answers ==

(B) We never talk about the rate of habitat reduction.

(C) "Principal" threat is extreme and we don't know what is the #1 threat.

(E) We can't make any comparison about the relative rates of natural disasters.