Q4

[andrewgong01]

My prephrase for this was " Goes up then goes down, net gain of zero"
This was because it said that trees produce oxygen but at the same time when the trees die they take away oxygen.

I was down to between "A" and "E" . I am not sure what I reasoned on test day where I went with "E" over "A" but I went with "A" on review.

A" A does talk about there is in increase in pay but the pay increase can be eroded. I am guessing the issue with "A" was when it said "partially eroded" (i.e. not ZERO like the passage) and that it added in a conditional clause on productivity. I think on test day i used this line of reasoning to get rid of "A"

E on the other hand though was something that I think goes along the lines of a net increase of zero but I still struggling to see how it is a better match than A despite A's flaws. "E" just does not really seem to get back to the idea of a net increase of Zero. It is saying we have heat and then that takes away water but the water "Eventually" comes back to Earth. I am assuming that "Eventually" is a match to the fact that trees take centuries to die but "elsewhere" was an added detail creep that sounded off because now it is hard to say if the specific place did indeed have a net increase of zero

Other choices:
B: This not come back to the idea of a net increase of zero where we have an increase at first then some decrease to net out the former increase
C: Opposite of what we want because it says that we still have a net increase because the cash return on crops offsets the higher costs
D: We do not care about the impact on other units/people/instiutions etc. This choice would be like saying trees produced more oxygen which in turn produced something else that increased oxygen even more

[ohthatpatrick]

(A), as you said, is not good enough because there's not a clear sense of net zero.

There's a sense of "if such and such happens, there will be a smaller increase".

(E) is conveying the idea that within a certain system, conservation of _____ is preserved. (net zero)

Water is removed from the system through evaporation, but this water is returned to the system via rain or snow.

Oxygen was added to the system through photosynthesis, but this oxygen was taken away via decomposition.

With the passage, we can say that "forests neither add nor subtract oxygen".
With (E), we can say that "hot weather neither adds nor subtracts water."