RC Question 19 Explanation
DISCUSSION: Lines 42-47 talk about Scheich’s method. He used a battery to create an electrical field and attract a platypus. Normally, a platypus wouldn’t hunt something made of metal. So that let Scheich test whether electricity was enough to attract a platypus.
Abstractly put, the method is: simulate something natural, to test whether an animal behaves like you think it will.
There’s one further, crucial element. The battery isn’t at all like something the platypus would normally hunt. So we can be sure the platypus is attracted to the electricity and not to anything else.
Obviously, it’s surprising that a platypus would attack a battery. They can’t eat batteries.
Many wrong answers feature animals attacking realistic decoys. That isn’t surprising.
___________
- If the decoys were good enough, it’s only natural that birds would be attracted to them.
- The tape plays copies of actual bird cries. It’s natural that birds could be fooled.
- CORRECT. There’s no reason that the animal would go near the object, unless the animal were attracted purely by heat.
- Same as A. If the replicas are good enough, it’s not surprising that fish are attracted to them.
- There’s nothing unusual about an animal being lured by meat.
Although I appreciate the reasoning clarifying why (c) is the correct answer, I was a bit hesitant at first because I was afraid the thematic similarity between (c) and the stimulus might be a red herring. In parallel reasoning questions for LR, for instance, I’ve noticed that answers that bear a strong thematic affinity to the stimulus tend to be incorrect “traps.” However, on RC, should we be more attuned to the content rather than the structure of different answer choices when asked to infer similar/parallel strategies? Thank you!
Red herrings are certainly possible in RC as well! But the content is often more relevant in RC because there is so much more context in a RC passage that can be relevant to the answer – in this case, the important context is that the “prey” has no similarities to actual platypus food other than its electrical energy.