Q5

[magnusgan]

Would someone please explain why 1 in 100 is correct and 1 in 1000 is wrong? Where is the inference which helps us establish that asteroid systems did or did not resemble those of planets???

Thanks!

[tommywallach]

Hey Magnus,

Let's take them one by one:

(A) The old folks weren't looking for secondary occultations, so this wouldn't make sense (the increase has been infinite!).

(B) We were told that reports of primary occultations with secondary occultations became really common ("too numerous to be accurate"), when they ought to be somewhere between 1 in 100 and 1 in 1000, so this isn't right.

(C) Again, we didn't have reports of secondary occultations before Herculina.

(D) CORRECT. Aha! We know that science says only somewhere between 1 in 100 and 1 in 1000 primary occultations should be accompanied with a secondary occultation (from the last sentence of paragraph 4), but we also know that reports became too common "to be accurate." So they must have been larger than 1 in 100.

(E) scrambles up the logic. We don't know how many primary occultations were reported to have been accompanied with multiple secondary occultations.

Hope that helps!

-t

[magnusgan]

Ahh... I see it now. The passage was saying that asteroid reports were too common to have all been accurate. At best, 1 in 100 of those reports could have been right.

Completely see why (B) is wrong and (D) is right! Thank you!

[tzyc]

Let me double check...
The passage says "they are now simply too numerous for all of them to be accurate" which means they are not all accurate, right?
Then the passage goes on saying.."only one in every hundred primary occultations would be accompanied by a secondary", meaning 1/100 is accurate.
The primary means past, not "the most important" here, and since in the past there were less reports and yet still 1/100 would be accurate, there were more accurate reports in the past correct? Thank you

[tommywallach]

Hey Strawberry,

Not quite. 1 in 100 is not "accurate." It is the uppermost limit of the "possible" based on the science. However, the passage implies than 1 in 100 would already be deeply implausible--it's just theoretically possible. Finally, there's no issue of past versus present, so I'm not quite sure where you're getting this issue. Everything here is about the present.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

-t

[tzyc]

Thanks for your response,
But I'm still not sure...
The question asks about after Herculina event the correct AC says more than one out of every handred cases, and this is different from the passage says (the passage says only in every hundred) So I thought it'd important to understand the difference between before the Herculina event and after the Herculina event.
I thought the problem is about the denominator change, and it says more than.......
Could you give me an explanation why the correct AC is correct if this understanding is wrong ?

Thank you