Q4 - A rare Roman bronze helmet was recently

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Necessary Assumption

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: The law is inadequate as way of giving English people access to their archaeological heritage.

Evidence: The law requires people who find cool archaeological stuff to offer to sell it to an English museum at a reasonable price, but not if the stuff found is neither prehistoric nor made of precious metal. That's why this rare Roman helmet was allowed to be sold to a private collector.

Answer Anticipation:
There seem to be a couple big missing links:
We're assuming that this rare Roman bronze helmet is part of the English people's archaeological heritage. (It's a Roman helmet, so why would it be part of English heritage? Just because it was found in England?)

We're also assuming that if the helmet were sold to a museum rather than to a private collector, it would have better given the English people access to their heritage. Since there are pretty apparent missing links, I would go hunting in the answers to see if anything matches either of those.

Correct Answer:
B

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) "Most" is wrong 99.9% of the time on Necessary Assumption. After all, the standard of correctness here is, "If I negate this, will it badly weaken the argument?" And who cares whether you're talking about 51% (most) or 49% (not-most) of a population?

(B) YES, this was one of our predictions. If you negate it, then the evidence has nothing to do with the conclusion.

(C) Oh, hi again "most". Bye.

(D) Whether private paid more than museum is irrelevant. We only care whether selling to private gives the English people less access than selling to museum.

(E) Wow, extreme. No museum COULD have paid more? Again, the argument has nothing to do with money. It's about whether this helmet was part of the English heritage and whether selling it to a private collector gives the English people less access to it than had it been sold to a museum.

Takeaway/Pattern: If there's a "New Guy in the Conclusion" on an Assumption question, it will almost certainly be in the correct answer. This conclusion talks about the law (which was discussed in the evidence) as well as "access to the English people's archaeological heritage" (which was not discussed in the evidence). So we could have fast tracked out way towards answers that talked about the archaeological heritage of the English people.

#officialexplanation