The United States has never been a great international trader. It found most of its raw materials and customers for finished products within its own borders. The terrible consequences of this situation have become apparent, as this country now owes the largest foreign debt in the world and is a playground for wealthy foreign investors. The moral is clear: a country can no more live without foreign trade than a dog can live by eating its own tail.
In order to advance her point of view, the author does each of the following EXCEPT:
(A) draw on an analogy
(B) appeal to historical fact
(C) identify a cause and an effect
(D) suggest a cause of the current economic situation
(E) question the ethical basis of an economic situation
4. Giselle: The government needs to ensure that the public consumes less petroleum. When things cost more, people buy and use less of them. Therefore, the government should raise the sales tax on gasoline, a major petroleum product.
Antoine: The government should not raise the sales tax on gasoline. Such an increase would be unfair to gasoline users. If taxes are to be increased, the increases should be applied in such a way that they spread the burden of providing the government with increased revenues among many people, not just the users of gasoline.
As a rebuttal of Giselle’s argument, Antoine’s response is ineffective because
(A) he ignores the fact that Giselle does not base her argument for raising the gasoline sales tax on the government’s need for increase revenues
(B) he fails to specify how many taxpayers there are who are not gasoline users
(C) his conclusion is based on an assertion regarding unfairness, and unfairness is a very subjective concept
(D) he mistakenly assumes that Giselle wants a sales tax increase only on gasoline
(E) he makes the implausible assumption that the burden of increasing government revenues can be more evenly distributed among the people through other means besides increasing the gasoline sales tax
5. A government agency publishes ratings of airlines, ranking highest the airlines that have the smallest proportion of late flights. The agency’s purpose is to establish an objective measure of the relative efficiency of different airlines’ personnel in meeting published flight schedules.
Which one of the following, if true, would tend to invalidate use of the ratings for the agency’s purpose?
(A) Travelers sometimes have no choice of airlines for a given trip at a given time.
(B) Flights are often made late by bad weather conditions that affect some airlines more that others.
(C) The flight schedules of all airlines allow extra time for flights that go into or out of very busy airports.
(D) Airline personnel are aware that the government agency is monitoring all airline flights for lateness.
(E) Flights are defined as “late” only if they arrive more that fifteen minutes past their scheduled arrival time, and a record is made of how much later than fifteen minutes they are.
6. Although this bottle is labeled “vinegar,” no fizzing occurred when some of the liquid in it was added to powder from this box labeled “baking soda.” But when an acidic liquid such as vinegar is added to baking soda the resulting mixture fizzes, so this bottle clearly has been mislabeled.
A flaw in the reasoning in the argument above is that this argument
(A) ignores the possibility that the bottle contained an acidic liquid other than vinegar
(B) fails to exclude an alternative explanation for the observed effect
(C) depends on the use of the imprecise term “fizz”
(D) does not take into account the fact that scientific principles can be definitively tested only under controlled laboratory conditions
(E) assumes that the fact of a labeling error is proof of an intention to deceive
7. Marine biologists have long thought that variation in the shell color of aquatic snails evolved as a protective camouflage against birds and other predators. Brown shells seem to be more frequent when the underlying seafloor is dark-colored and white shells more frequent when the underlying seafloor is light-colored. A new theory has been advanced, however, that claims that shell color is related to physiological stress associated with heat absorption. According to this theory, brown shells will be more prevalent in areas where the wave action of the sea is great and thus heat absorption from the Sun is minimized, whereas white shells will be more numerous in calmer waters where the snails will absorb more heat from the Sun’s rays.
Evidence that would strongly favor the new theory over the traditional theory would be the discovery of a large majority of
(A) dark-shelled snails in a calm inlet with a dark, rocky bottom and many predators
(B) dark-shelled snails in a calm inlet with a white, sandy bottom
(C) light-shelled snails in an inlet with much wave action and a dark, rocky bottom
(D) light-shelled snails in a calm inlet with a dark, rocky bottom and many predators
(E) light-shelled snails in a calm inlet with a white, sandy bottom and many predators
8. Measurements of the extent of amino-acid decomposition in fragments of eggshell found at archaeological sites in such places as southern Africa can be used to obtain accurate dates for sites up to 200,000 years old. Because the decomposition is slower in cool climates, the technique can be used to obtain accurate dates for sites almost a million years old in cooler regions.
The information above provides the most support for which one of the following conclusions?
(A) The oldest archaeological sites are not in southern Africa, but rather in cooler regions of the world.
(B) The amino-acid decomposition that enables eggshells to be used in dating does not take place in other organic matter found at ancient archaeological sites.
(C) If the site being dated had been subject to large unsuspected climatic fluctuations during the time the eggshell has been at the site, application of the technique is less likely to yield accurate results.
(D) After 200,000 years in a cool climate, less than one-fifth of the amino acids in a fragment of eggshell that would provide material for dating with the technique will have decomposed and will thus no longer be suitable for examination by the technique.
(E) Fragments of eggshell are more likely to be found at ancient archaeological sites in warm regions of the world than at such sites in cooler regions.
