Q7 - Soil scientists studying the role

[csunnerberg13]

Expected: regardless of environment, compost would fail to be a good replacement of fertilizer because it's quantities of essential nutrients are too low.

Unexpected result: home gardeners are successful growing plants in soil that lacked nutrients by enriching it with nothing but compost.

We want an answer that explains how that could happen...

(A) That's great, but why did the home gardeners have success even if all the researchers are agreeing? More reason to be suspicious of what happened! Eliminate

(B) Interesting - so the 2 composts are different...Keep for now.

(C) tells us most plants in both environments needed the same things... more reason to wonder how the home gardeners were successful and no reason to explain it is offered here. Eliminate

(D) tells us that the initial conditions were enriching the soil in both environments were the same. More reason to wonder what happened, because they started out in the same state of low nutrients...And still no explanation offered here. Eliminate

(E) gives us more reason to be suspicious of the home gardeners result...it's telling us there are some plants that home gardeners plant that need even more nutrients than the types the researchers usually use. That gives more reason to wonder how the plants grew so well and does not give any explanation. Eliminate.

(B) wins - if the compost is different than what the scientists experimented with, then they can't make any conclusions about the compost the home gardeners used because they never tested that.

[christine.defenbaugh]

Excellent reasoning here csunnerberg13! I love how you are modelling deferring on an answer choice and coming back to it. That process of working from wrong-to-right is a rockstar for efficiently zeroing in on the correct answer.

And you're absolutely right, if the 'compost' studied by the scientists is a totally different 'compost' than that used by the home gardeners, then it's really not that weird at all that the results are totally different. They're using totally different 'composts'!

Keep up the awesome work!

[vardhamaan.lodha]

Hi there.I understand that they used totally different compost.i rejected this choice because i thot using different ingredients does'nt guarantee the involvement of nutrients in them.Please clear my doubt.Thank you.