Slavery

[nileshdalvi]

The first African slaves were brought to the
Americas in the early 1600s, where their labor was
used primarily for agricultural and household
purposes. The institution of slavery in the New
World presupposes not only the existence of slaves
and owners, but also a system of laws in place
which recognized and protected the practice of
slavery. However, laws were not enacted, for
example, declaring slaves the personal property of
their owners and imposing punishments upon those
who aided slaves in escape, until many years later.
If the sentences in the passage above are true, then
they support which one of the following statements?
(A) Arguing that laws needed to be enacted
recognizing and protecting the institution of
slavery before the practice of slavery could
have existed in the New World is to ignore
historical fact.
(B) Prior to 1700, some of the Europeans who
came to the New World enslaved native
Indian populations.
(C) Slavery was practiced in many parts of the
world before Africans were first brought to
the New World as slaves.
(D) The prior existence of a supportive legal
system is needed before an institutional practice
can develop.
(E) One of the reasons slavery developed in the
New World was the tremendous need for
manual labor.

[dhonu121]

This one is an inference/conclusion question type in my opinion.
I would go for A here.
Since other one's B-E are out of scope.They must not necessarily be true for the above mentioned argument.
What's the OA ?

[nileshdalvi]

@dhonu121: Any other way apart from PoE to obtain this answer. BTW, your answer is correct. But I also cannot see how A is necessarily true for the above mentioned argument. How does it mean ignoring the historical fact??

[dhonu121]

Thanks Nilesh for confirming the answer.
How I approached this one was firstly I read all the answer choices.Except A all of them did not sounded must be true kind to me.However, I was not sure about A.
Then when I read A again, I was more convinced about its being that right answer than others.
Basically, there are two things why I preferred A over others.
1.A is within the scope of the argument.i.e. It talks nothing about things that are not mentioned in the stimulus.
2.It says things that are correct beyond reasonable doubt.
The passage mentions that there was a system of laws in place
which recognized and protected the practice of
slavery.. And it says nothing about that laws needed to be enacted
recognizing and protecting the institution of
slavery before the practice of slavery could
have existed in the New World which is stated in choice A.
Hence to say this would be wrong.
Choice A just paraphrases this.
Hence, A wins.

[nileshdalvi]

@Dhonu121: Sorry but I could not understand the point 2 you mentioned. I agree with point 1 that it is within the scope of the argument but of course that should not be the only criteria to judge an answer choice.

About the argument, it is mentioned that the institution presupposes that laws should exist along with slavery. But, laws were enacted later. So, if I argue that the laws needed to be enacted earlier, it is surely against the historical fact, but I wont be ignoring the historical fact.

I have no doubt that the answer should be A because the others are nowhere close, but I seem to not meet the link in the correct answer choice.

[dhonu121]

In this case I would say that 1 alone suffices to rule out other answer choices.
Rest all answer choices are outside the scope of the argument and hence are ruled out.

About 2, If you feel that 1 above is not sufficient to rule out other answer choices(which it actually is ), I think that the argument mentions that there were already laws before.Hence, the presense of laws tells emphasises the need about the presense of those laws.Also, the laws that were enacted were not exactly the ones that existed before and that are mentioned in choice A.
Hence this suggests, that laws mentioned were already there and followed too.
I would suggest not to compare things in option A and in the passage literally.That should help.