Critical Reasoning

fitzgerald23 wrote:Lets give this a try. Very hard question.

I would break down the passage into the following points:

1. Archaeologists believe that some Egyptian stone tablets were purposely designed with a 1.618 ratio.
2. They believe every symbol was constructed with that ratio to preserve it
3. Mathematicians disagree that the Egyptians knew of this ratio.

We want to find a way to strengthen the point that the Egyptians knew of the ratio.

A. Incorrect. What the Greek mathematicians did with old artifacts has nothing to do with Egyptians discovering it.

B. Incorrect. This tells us that there is nobody discovered who came before the Egyptians who used the ratio, but it does not prove that the Egyptians did or did not purposely use it. We need to know what happened in the Egyptian era.

C. Incorrect. Just because the tablet was scribed by a mathematician it does not tell us anything about the tablet. If the tablet symbols had a 2:1 ratio then we would be weakening the Archaeologists claim since the mathematician would be signing off on a totally different ratio.

D. Incorrect. Again this answer choice gives us no pertinent information about how the tablet is designed. It does further validate that all the items in the excavation site came from the same people, but that is not what we are concerned with here. We want to know how to prove that the limestone uses the ratio in some manner not that it is made of the same material as other items in the site.

E. Correct. This is the only selection that tells us that not just some stone tablets had what appeared to be the ratio. This tells us that we now have another tablet from that era of a different material that uses the 1.618 ratio on all the symbols of the tablet, which reinforced the archaeologists point that the Egyptians did use this ratio for their symbols before the Greeks did years later.

gmat1011 wrote:Pretty tough. I would say this question broadly follows the logic of this question that came across in the OG:

The spacing of the four holes on a fragment of a bone flute excavated at a Neanderthal campsite is just what is required to play the third through sixth notes of the diatonic scale-the seven-note musical scale used in much of Western music since the Renaissance. Musicologists therefore hypothesize that the diatonic musical scale was developed and used thousands of years before it was adopted by Western musicians.

Which of the following, if true, most strongly supports the hypothesis?

A. Bone flutes were probably the only musical instrument made by Neanderthals.
B. No musical instrument that is known to have used a diatomic scale is of an earlier date than the flute found at the Neanderthal campsite.
C. The flute was made from a cave-bear bone and the campsite at which the flute fragment was excavated was in a cave that also contained skeletal remains of cave bears.
D. Flutes are the simplest wind instrument that can be
What is the answer to this question .Whats the OA and OE Please
constructed to allow playing a diatonic scale.
E. The cave-bear leg bone used to make the Neanderthal flute would have been long enough to make a flute capable of playing a complete diatonic scale.

mundasingh123 wrote:Option D talks about exact cut of the Limestone rock and i thought that cut refers to design .This led me to believe that A lot of other artifacts that have the same design , have been discovered

Choice (D) wrote:"...made from the exact cut of rare limestone rock as was used to construct the tablet."