Q26 - Current evidence indicates that there

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Sufficient Assumption

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: If there is no methane, then there is definitely no life on Planet 253.

Evidence: Microbes always produce methane, and current evidence on Planet 253 is that there is no methane.

Answer Anticipation:
It took a while for me to figure out that they want the 2nd sentence to be the conclusion. Given the premise trigger "SINCE" in the last sentence, we know that the 2nd half of the final sentence is at least *a* conclusion. I assumed it was the main conclusion, but if it were then the argument would already be airtight, since the last sentence just says a conditional and then states its contrapositive. In order for there to be a gap, I had to assume that the 2nd sentence was the intended conclusion. The author is making a move from "no microbes" to "no life". If we wanted to see this conditionally,
CONC: if no methane --------------------------> no life.
EVID: if no methane --> no microbes.
.........The missing link is "no microbes --> no life"

Correct Answer:
D

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) I'm sure this will be tempting to people, but we don't need to factually establish this claim. The conclusion is hypothetical, so we don't need to prove that it's factually the case, just that it would hypothetically be the case.

(B) This is still relating to trying to factually guarantee that there really isn't methane, which is not needed to prove the hypothetical conclusion.

(C) This is also trying to do what (A) and (B) are doing, but it does an even worse job, because we couldn't trigger this conditional in the first place. Even if we could, we don't need to factually establish that there is no methane.

(D) YES, "if no microbes, then no life".

(E) This is just a pointless illegal negation of the conclusion.

Takeaway/Pattern: Bizarre stuff. Again, there are not great context clues for picking the 2nd sentence as the conclusion, but since we know this argument needs a gap, we can't consider that final claim in the paragraph the conclusion, because the "since" idea would fully justify it. Once we decide they're intending the 2nd sentence to be the conclusion, then we know the idea of "No Life" is a NEW GUY IN THE CONCLUSION, and thus it must be in the correct answer, leaving only (D) to consider.

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