Q3

[b91302310]

I referred to line 37-40 to answer this question. I focused on their eating behavior as "One never eat plant to the exclusion of others" but I did not find the answer addressing the same issue.
Also, I could not understand why the correct answer is (D). The only thing I can connect the eating behavior with (D) is "move on".

So, could anyone explain why D is correct? Also, is there any insight required to answer this kind of question? (e.g. What kind of feature should we pay attention to in analogy)

Thanks in advance.

[giladedelman]

Thanks for posting!

I've noticed on these "most analogous" questions that the correct answer is rarely awesome. Most of the time, it has a slight connection to the example in the passage, while the other answers have no connection. So we really need to treat the question stem literally: which one is most analogous to the okapi's eating behavior?

I try to identify all the important traits I can before I head to the answer choices, because we don't really know which aspect the right answer will contain; there are multiple ways for things to be analogous.

In this case, I said to myself, okay, what do we know about the okapi's eating behavior? Well:

- unlike any other animal in the central African forest, they eat only leaves
- they eat more than 100 types, of which 20 are preferred
- they never eat just one type of leaf; even if their favorite is there, they'll still just eat a little bit before moving on to try the other leaves (a lot like me at a buffet table, which leads to weird meals)

Now, we can look at the answer choices:

(A) doesn't look good because we're explicitly told that the okapis don't consume all of a type of leaf before moving to the next one.

(B) is just from a different universe. I don't see how we can connect following a syllabus and answering student questions to okapis' eating behavior.

(C) is about a procrastinator. That has nothing to do with the okapis.

(E) is not a match because the passage says nothing about when in particular the okapi eats, and nothing about it hiding otherwise.

So, those four are clearly incorrect. We're left with (D), which is the most analogous example because in skipping around from story to story, reading just headlines and paragraphs, the reader analogizes the okapi's tendency to bounce from leaf to leaf, moving on to the next before finishing the one it's eating.

Does that answer your question?