QUESTION TEXT: Which one of the following is mentioned in…
DISCUSSION: Passage A talks about how negative evidence can disprove a theory. Passage B actually gives an example of a theory being disproved.
Those are the main points of each passage, so I assumed they might be the answer. And they were. It’s useful to predict the answer in advance, even if you may only be 70% sure it will be right. If it is right, you go much faster. If it isn’t, you’ve lost very little, as prephrasing forces you to think everything over regardless.
___________
- Neither passage mentions this. In fact passage B doesn’t even mention experiments.
- Neither passage mentions revising a theory. Discarding an auxiliary assumption is not “revising a theory”. Auxiliary assumptions are separate from theories, see lines 22-28 for discussion. The author says it’s not clear “which one” is false, implying that negative evidence could disprove auxiliary assumptions while leaving a theory unaffected.
Example of revising a theory: Previously, we thought all butterflies are orange or blue. But now we think they can be orange or blue or green. However, the old theory is still broadly correct, as 99% of butterflies are orange or blue. - CORRECT. See line 20 and line 62.
- Passage A doesn’t mention planets.
- Passage B doesn’t mention experiments. Passage A mentions testable theories in lines 15-16, but it doesn’t specify if the tests must be by experiment.
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