Q2 - Anthropologist: One of the distinctive

[ohthatpatrick]

What does the Question Stem tell us?
Strengthen

Break down the Stimulus:
Conclusion: Cooking probably made it possible for us to get more calories from a less food.
Evidence: Correlation between larger brain and controlling fire. Even modern humans who eat only raw food have a hard time getting enough calories.

Any prephrase?
There is a missing bridge idea from "controlling fire --> cooking" and from "cooking --> more calories from less food". There is also a correlation between larger brain and controlling fire, and the author is implicitly thinking it goes "control fire --> cooking --> getting more calories from less food --> bigger brain". A typical causal objection here would be reverse causality: "Hey, maybe the big brains came first and allowed us to be smart enough to control fire". A strengthen answer could rule out such an objection, could rule out an alternative explanation for how we get more calories from less food, or add more plausibility to the author's causal story.

Correct answer:
D

Answer choice analysis:
A) This seems to weaken. The author is thinking that "cooking --> more calories from less food" and uses raw food as an example of "not enough calories".

B) This seems to weaken. This shows how you could have gotten a lot of calories from raw food back in the day, as long as you were willing to eat meat.

C) This is like the first two. We want cooked > raw.

D) This strengthens, because it helps to give us "cooking --> more calories from less food". We burn calories while eating (the effort involved in chewing and digesting is using the body's energy), so the brain would only get nourished by the residual calories (the net leftover calories). This answer choice helps us see that for a given food, we would retain more overall calories if the food were cooked than if it were eaten raw.

E) It's unclear what effect this has, since there's no contrast drawn in the argument between domesticated vs. wild food sources (just cooked vs. raw). But if anything, this would drift towards an ALTERNATIVE explanation for how we get more calories from less food, thereby weakening.

Takeaway/Pattern: The correct answer addresses the plausibility of the author's hypothesis that "COOKING made it possible for us to get more calories from less food." Since he didn't explain the causal mechanism that would connect "cooking --> more calories", (D) is providing us with that connective tissue.

#officialexplanation

[ganbayou]

I eliminated the other questions to arrive at D but still a bit not sure why D is correct...Does this answer connects premise to premise instead of connecting conclusion to the premise?

[LsatCrusher822]

D works because it links up the "raw food" portion of the evidence to the conclusion about how cooking probably caused humans to be able to support a large brain (by getting more calories from less food). It ties in the second piece of evidence to the calorie portion by showing how cooked food has an advantage over raw food in terms of providing the calories needed by the body. The first evidence is just a correlation between the advent of fire and when humans started to get a large brain.

[ganbayou]

D works because it links up the "raw food" portion of the evidence to the conclusion about how cooking probably caused humans to be able to support a large brain (by getting more calories from less food). It ties in the second piece of evidence to the calorie portion by showing how cooked food has an advantage over raw food in terms of providing the calories needed by the body. The first evidence is just a correlation between the advent of fire and when humans started to get a large brain.

But in the stimulus it says "getting more calories" on the other hand D says "uses more calories" I thought the two are different things...