Q25 - Ecological terms like "invasive species" invoke human

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Match the Implied Principle

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: Ecologists should avoid terms like "invasive species" (that invoke human cultural standards)
Evidence: These types of terms can influence ecologists' opinions before any data is gathered about impact.

Answer Anticipation:
What is the implied principle (i.e. how could we put the missing bridge idea into fuzzier, general language)? I'd say something like "If a term influences opinion before impact has been gathered, then avoid using it." Or even more broadly, "if doing something can lead us to negatively prejudge something before we have evidence of its negativity, we should avoid doing it".

Correct Answer:
D

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) "No matter how strong the evidence" immediately makes this wrong. In the invasive species example, the ecologists DON'T yet have any evidence. This is probably just using police as a topic because we know that "negatively prejudging" is a frequent complaint when it comes to racial profiling.

(B) There's nothing in here that relates to "if a term/action would influence your opinion before you have evidence". This is using the topic of environmental regulators to bait students into picking something similar to "ecologists".

(C) This is tempting in terms of "don't use certain types of language", but the reason why is "because people will hate you for it", not "because it will influence opinions before evidence is gathered".

(D) Maybe. Probably. Sure! The conclusion is saying we should avoid a certain type of language (and again, that language is imbued with human connotations). The evidence matches "can influence opinions before evidence is in" better than any other answer. "Influence expectations" = "influence opinions", and "how something will handle unanticipated inputs" = "how an ecosystem will handle an unanticipated 'invasive species'."

(E) The evidence here is "don't use this language because it's often wrong", which isn't as good a match as (D) is for "don't use this language because it can influence our opinion before the data is in".

Takeaway/Pattern: On many matching questions, we often see topic traps, such as (B). We need to have a strong mental prephrase of our desired bridge idea so that we can strip each answer of the topic and just look to see whether there are strong synonym matches for our key concepts.

#officialexplanation