RC Question 8 Explanation
DISCUSSION: The main point of passage B is that we don’t know how accurate fingerprint analysis is. There are also no objective standards for fingerprint analysis.
The author does not say how we ought to use fingerprints in court, if at all.
___________
- Passage B never mentions how we use fingerprint evidence in trials.
- Same as A. The author of passage B never says that fingerprint evidence has no use in criminal trials. It’s just not 100% effective. Perhaps it can be useful, even if it is not definitive on it’s own.
- Look at the first two sentences of the final paragraph of passage B. The author doesn’t say what the error rate is. He said we don’t know the error rate because we haven’t done many studies.
- CORRECT. This sums things up. We lack objective standards for fingerprint analysis, and we don’t know what the error rate is.
- The author didn’t say whether legal scholars are aware of the problems with fingerprint analysis.
I didn’t get the reasoning of (C). Didn’t the author mention that “a more rigorous test showed 34 percent rate of erroneous identification”? I chose D over C primarily for the reason that the latter was too narrow, and didn’t cover the other issues – method, smudged, lack of objective identification – which the author mentioned.
Good question. You have to look at the whole paragraph. Some studies found few errors, some other studies found a 34% error rate. The start of the paragraph says that we haven’t done systematic study of the error rate.
The takeaway from this is we don’t know the true rate. We have a few studies, and they conflict with each other. More studies are required to really know the rate.
Note: This is an old comment but I wanted to clarify the point.