揽瓜阁逻辑做题小分队Day159 - ChaseDream

Environmentalist: Several thousand chemicals are found in our nation's drinking water, and the health effects of most of them are not completely known. Yet, in the past fifteen years, the government has added only one new chemical to the two dozen or so that it regulates in drinking water. Thus, the government's regulation of chemicals in drinking water is not sufficient to protect public health.

Finding the answer to which of the following questions is most likely to be the most helpful in evaluating the environmentalist's argument?

A. How many of the chemicals the government currently regulates in drinking water have ever posed a risk to public health when found at high concentrations?

B. By what means other than regulating chemicals in drinking water does the government work to protect public health?

C. How many chemicals have been present in significant concentrations in the nation's drinking water for more than fifteen years while not being subject to government regulation?

D. Why are health effects of most chemicals found in the nation's drinking water not completely known?

E. Are there two or more chemicals that, at the concentrations present significantly often in the nation's drinking water over the last 15 years, can damage human health?

Taxonomist: The taxonomic classes of animals on Earth (e.g., birds, mammals, reptiles) have probably almost all been identified by biologists, even though many individual species in some classes remain undiscovered. Thus, to get a good estimate of the total number of animal species on Earth, researchers could count the species in one of the most thoroughly studied classes (the classes in which almost all species have probably been identified), then multiply classes.

A. confuses a claim about classes of animals with an analogous claim about species in those classes.

B. takes for granted that the average number of species per class of animals is roughly the number in one of the most thoroughly studied classes.

C. fails to adequately address the possibility that biologists could estimate the total number of animal species without considering the number of known classes.

D. conflates the total number of animal species with the total number of animal species that biologists have identified.

E. presumes, without providing justification, that the number of unidentified species in the most thoroughly studied classes of animals and in the less studied classes is roughly the same.