Lucas M. answered • 06/21/19
*REDUCED RATE DUE TO COVID-19* 99th Pct. SAT/ACT Tutor / Homework Help
Answer Choices B and C are the correct answers because Lines 64-67 say, “These experiments were repeated after a two-month interval and showed that different birds differed in their responses but the responses of individual birds were consistent over time,” telling us that it’s unlikely for a single bird to show inconsistent behaviors. Answer Choice B best matches this, saying that it would be atypical for a single red-headed finch to “approach novel objects without hesitation one week but entirely avoid them the next.” For Question 46, Answer Choice A is incorrect because the Passage suggests that, one, the behavior of an individual finch remains consistent over time and, two, that red-headed finches return to feeding relatively slowly after a predator display. Answer Choice C is incorrect because it only concerns the relative difference in speed for two red-headed finches, a point that the Passage claims is normal. Answer Choice D is incorrect because the Passage tells us that the behavior of individual finches is consistent over time and that red-headed finches are likely to display aggression. For Question 47, Answer Choice A is incorrect because it only describes a feature of the researcher’s methodology, and not something to suggest the atypical behavior of a finch. Answer Choice B is incorrect because it only says that red-headed and black-headed birds differed in their response to novel objects, and doesn’t match any of our answer choices from Question 46. Answer Choice D is incorrect because it recapitulates the differences between red-headed and black-headed birds, but doesn’t match any of our answer choices for Question 46.
How to solve this? Question 46 asks, “It can reasonably be inferred from the passage that is would be atypical for an individual red-headed finch to [...]?” Because this is a Paired Question, we should typically begin by going through the answer choices for Question 47, looking for a Text that can tell us something about what would be atypical of a red-headed finch. However, as we go through the answer choices, we should notice that none of them say explicitly something that is atypical of a single red-headed finch, although a couple do suggest some of the general behavioral differences between red-headed and black-headed finches. But, we should realize that we can’t say in advance which point the Question is going to highlight, so we should [switch gears] and try to approach the Paired Questions from Question 46.
Along the way, we should / may also notice that the Question asks about an “individual” red-headed finch and that one of the answer choices for Question 46 makes a point about individual finches, saying, “These experiments were repeated after a two-month interval and showed that different birds differed in their responses but the responses of individual birds were consistent over time,” so we might expect our answer choice to relate to this.
For Question 45, Answer Choice A says [...].
