Lucas M. answered • 06/06/19
*REDUCED RATE DUE TO COVID-19* 99th Pct. SAT/ACT Tutor / Homework Help
Answer Choices D and A are the correct answer choices because Lines 17-21 say, “But only about one percent of these organisms can be grown in a lab. The rest in staggering numbers, have remained uncultured and of limited use to medical science, until now.” This tells us that most of the organisms that could produce antibiotics were unable to be grown in labs, until Lewis’s method was introduced. This most clearly Answer Choice D which says that the advantage of Lewis’s method is that it “allows researchers to make use of soil bacteria that they had previously been unable to exploit.” For Question 45, Answer Choice B is incorrect because, although it does provide a possible advantage that Lewis’s team exploits, no answer choice for the previous question matches it. Answer Choice C also presents a possible advantage of the method, but likewise doesn’t have an answer choice that matches it. Answer Choice D is incorrect because it talks about the advantage and effectiveness of the teixobactin, but the method of Lewis’s team. For Question 44, Answer Choice A is incorrect because the experiment doesn’t replicate specific features in “artificial soil,” but rather grows them “in their natural environment.” Answer Choice B is incorrect because neither our Text nor our Passage tell us that Lewis’s method allows microorganisms to take in more nutrients than in their natural settings. Answer Choice C is incorrect because nothing is said about Lewis’s method affecting the cell walls of bacteria rather than the protein they produce.
How to solve this? Question 44 asks, “The author of Passage 1 suggests that an advantage of the method Lewis’s team used to grow microorganisms is that it [...]?” Because this is a Paired Question, to solve it we should begin by going through the answer choices for Question 45, looking for any texts that tell us about a possible advantage to Lewis’s team’s method.
For Question 45, Answer Choice A says that “only one percent of these organisms can be grown in a lab. The rest, in staggering numbers, have remained uncultured and of limited use to medical science, until now.” This answer choice doesn’t seem to tell us too directly the benefit of Lewis’s method, but because it does suggest that the method allows for new antibiotics to be grown in culture, a possible advantage, we should keep this option. Answer Choice B says, “to do this, the team designed a gadget that sandwiches a soil sample between two membranes, each perforated with pores that allow molecules like nutrients to diffuse through but don’t allow the passage of cells.” Because this answer choice tells us about a gadget that the team developed, a possible advantage, so we should keep this option. Answer Choice C says that the team use the gadget “to trick the bacteria into thinking that they are in their natural environment.” Because this answer choice elaborates on the first one, and suggests a possible advantage of the team, we should keep this option. Answer Choice D says that, “It’s likely that teixobactin is effective because of the way it targets disease: The drug breaks down bacterial cell walls by attacking the lipid molecules that the cell creates organically.” Because this answer choice refers more to an advantage of the teixobactin itself, and not the method of the team that cultured it, we should eliminate this option.
This leaves us with Answer Choices A, B and C, which we have to use Question 44 to decide between. Before looking back at that question, however, we should note briefly the point each text makes:
Answer Choice A — previously, helpful organisms were unable to be grown in labs, but now they can be.
Answer Choice B — the team designed a new gadget which allowed nutrients to pass through a membrane but not cells.
Answer Choice C — the team “tricked” the bacteria into thinking that they were in their natural environment.
For Question 44, Answer Choice A says that an advantage of the method used by Lewis is that it “identifies the requirements for soil bacteria to thrive and replicates those features in artificial soil.” Because this answer choice does seem to match both Answer Choices B and C for Question 45, we can keep this option. Answer Choice B says that an advantage of the method used by Lewis is that it “enables soil bacteria to take in more nutrients than they typically consume in natural settings.” Because the Passage only says that it enables soil bacteria to absorb similar amounts of nutrients to what they absorb naturally, not more, we should eliminate this option. Answer Choice C says that an advantage of the method used by Lewis is that it “directly affects the cell walls of bacteria rather than the proteins those bacteria produce.” This answer choice seems to reference Answer Choice D from Question 45, but we should remember that Choice D referred to an advantage of teixobactin, not Lewis’s method, so we can eliminate this option. Answer Choice D says that an advantage of the method used by Lewis is that it “allows researchers to make use of soil bacteria that they had previously been unable to exploit.” Because this answer choice matches Answer Choice A, we should keep this option.
That leaves us with either Answer Choice A for Question 44 and Answer Choices B or C for Question 45, or it leaves us with Answer Choice D for Question 44 and Answer Choice A for Question 45. We should notice two things. One, that Answer Choice D for Question 44 provides more general answer choice, which is usually an advantage. Two, that Answer Choice A says that the soil used by Lewis’s team is “artificial,” when elsewhere in the Passage we’re told that the bacteria are grown in their natural environment (Line 25). For that reason, we should eliminate that option, and choose Answer Choices D and A for our correct answers.
