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600-700 Mosquitoes

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by challenger63 » Tue Jan 15, 2013 1:22 am
It is proposed to introduce mosquitoes into the wild with genetic alterations that destroy their disease-carrying capacity. In this way, the dangerous wild population could eventually be replaced with a harmless one without leaving room for another disease-transmitting type to flourish. One candidate gene would interfere with mosquito's finding mates; another would cause destruction of a disease parasite before the stage at which it could be transmitted; another would disable the mosquito's own resistance to disease, so that it would die before transmitting the disease.

Which of the following identifies a discrepancy in the proposal above?

A) It is presupposed that the three genes would prove equally easy to isolate and insert into cells of the mosquitoes.

B) Two of the ways of destroying disease carrying capacity in the wild would jeopardize the goals of the proposal.

C) It does not take into account positive roles that mosquitoes play in the environment, such as serving, in the larval stage, as food for fish.

D) None of the proposed alternatives would ensure that there would be fewer mosquitoes in any given area.

E) Evidence is not presented to show that each alternative method has been successfully tested on a wide scale
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Source: — Critical Reasoning |

by charu_mahajan » Tue Jan 15, 2013 10:41 am
Is the answer A

C, D and E are irrelevant.

I'm not shy to say that I quite did not understand B

so, IMO A
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by Bill@VeritasPrep » Tue Jan 15, 2013 2:26 pm
We're looking for a reason that the proposal is not going to achieve its goal: to have fewer diseased mosquitoes. Notice that there is nothing about reducing the total number, which is a common interpretation. C and D are answers that exploit that mistake.

A is a popular answer, but it doesn't lessen the chances of reaching the goal. Maybe the genes are not equally easy to isolate. Does that mean we can't still reach our goal? Nope; we could choose the easy one and it could still be effective.

E has a similar problem. Evidence is not presented, but does that mean we can't reach our goal? Not really; it simply means we don't know how likely we are to get there.

B works. It tells us that two of our methods are counterproductive; they won't allow us to replace the wild population with our modified population.

The first method would interfere with the modified mosquitos' ability to find mates. Well, if they can't interbreed with the wild population, how are they going to replace them? That's not going to be effective.

The third method would disable the modified mosquitos' resistance to disease, which means that they're likely to die before they can interbreed with the wild population.
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by challenger63 » Mon Jan 21, 2013 5:00 am
OA is B
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by kevinbacon » Fri Oct 04, 2013 11:11 pm
Males NEVER bite. The female mosquito needs human blood for her eggs to hatch properly, otherwise, she too, will drink flower nectar.
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