Q9

[shirando21]

I wasn't sure why B is better than A.

Also, the author in Passage B does not seem to have an opinion, so how do I know what the authors will disagree about?

[rinagoldfield]

Good questions, Shirando21. The author’s position is definitely trickier to discern in Passage B than in Passage A. The author of Passage A lays out his case explicitly: fingerprint identification is quite dependable and provides good evidence. "Experts have long concurred about its reliability," he writes, adding that fingerprinting has "ably withstood the test of time." (Lines 18-23)

The author of Passage B is less direct, but he also takes a position. He offers his opinion in his very last line: "No fingerprint examiner can answer such questions [about partial prints from different people matching] decisively, yet the answers are critical to evaluating the value of fingerprint evidence." (Lines 56-58)

In other words, the author of Passage B believes he lacks the necessary information to know whether fingerprint evidence is reliable or not. The value of this kind of evidence therefore remains uncertain in his eyes.

Question 9 asks what the authors would most likely disagree about. (B) is correct; the authors would probably disagree about the "likelihood that a fingerprint examiner will incorrectly declare a match in a given criminal case." The author of Passage A believes that fingerprint evidence is reliable, so he would probably evaluate such a likelihood as low. The author of Passage B is unconvinced that fingerprint evidence is reliable, so he would probably say that the likelihood is impossible to determine.

(A) is half-scope. Only Passage A discusses the training of fingerprint examiners.
(C) is out of scope. Neither passage discusses scientific law.
(D) is unsupported. Neither passage compares the merits of point-counting to the merits of holistic methods, although Passage B mentions both.
(E) is supported by both passages (lines 24-25 in Passage A and lines 41-43 in Passage B). The authors agree on this point, so chuck this answer choice.

[logicfiend]

As a note, (C) is not out of scope, although it is unsupported. Passage A mentions on lines 16-18, "Although fingerprint identification has not attained the status of scientific law, it has been in criminal trials for 100 years..." But we still don't know what Passage B thinks about this.

[haeeunjee]

The textual evidence for this:
Passage A (lines 33-35) - "The court.. therefore within discretion in crediting testimony that fingerprint ID has an exceedingly low error rate."
Passage B (lines 59-65) - "a more rigorous test showed a 34 percent rate of erroneous ID."