Reading Comprehension

That was hard for me

E. As There's no 'religious' reference in the excerpt

OMG! E is incorrect. A it is.

I've a doubt with option C.

Third paragraph talks about scientists predating Darwin accepted a "missing link" between humans and apes. Can this "missing link" be generalized to humans and apes having common ancestors?

It came down to choosing between A and E for me. I also correlated "creationist" to religious doctrine but failed to find the scientific reference (Chomsky=linguist+philosopher for me ).

But I have a question for Dana. Dana, does the GMAT really test the taker's knowledge pertaining to specifics such as "creationist"(A concept of christianity)? Do let me know as it will help me increase the sphere of my prep.

Great passage and question nonetheless. Kudos.

Testimony to this tendency is that while the general population is inclined to believe that human abilities are the product of divine intervention or even, as some think, intervention from outer space, many are unwilling to accept.....Then talks about Carl Jung and Noam Chomsky's theory which would knock out E for me.

Leaving me with A, it is never really stated that there is no essential difference between human and animal intelligence, in fact I think she argues that it paragraph 1.

I still feel that E is the more logical answer.

The reason against A is that it is the central idea of the passage and the differences between adjectives like "essential", "qualitative" and "quantitative" don't matter against the stronger candidate that is E.

I am betting on E because the author is in no way trying to argue that scientific theories sometimes agree with fundamental religious doctrines. He simply mentions the fact about Noam Chomsky's theory and creationism in an attempt to prove that mankind still favours creationist theories when compared to scientific evolutionary theories. That's all. He is NOT arguing in favour of (E)

Are we simply trying to push A as the right answer because we think the question is more difficult than it looks to be? Even is the answer key says A, I will stick the "E" on the GMAT.

I would appreciate other people's opinions on this.

wow. awesome question. I could have never judged "creationist view" is religious view :roll:

Tricky one!! I chose E initially..
Then I read Dana's explanation, and yes A makes sense..

thanks for answer

Looks like E

wow, awesome question. It took me 6 minutes to read the para and like some other people marked E.

ANSWER: E

Whoosh! This is a long passage... I was also stuck between option A and Option E. Though it was tough to eliminate option E, so I went to analyse option A first.

To me the word (in bold) stands out... " there is no essential difference between human and animal intelligence" -- The author never said that there is no essential difference. Infact, the author is trying to argue about the missing link between Apes and Humans and describes two viewpoints 'evolutionary perspective' and the 'Traditional perspective'. The mention of 'Missing Link' to me means that there is a difference between the human and animal intelligence which the author is talking about...

I think the answer is A.