SAT Reading & Writing · Inferences
This difference between children and apes most strongly suggests that children's faithful copying of irrelevant steps may reflect ______
In studies where an adult demonstrates a series of actions to solve a puzzle box, including some steps that are causally unnecessary to opening the box, children tend to faithfully copy even the unnecessary steps, while some great apes tested on similar tasks tend to skip steps that appear visibly irrelevant to the outcome. Which choice most logically completes the text?
This difference between children and apes most strongly suggests that children's faithful copying of irrelevant steps may reflect ______
This difference between children and apes most strongly suggests that children's faithful copying of irrelevant steps may reflect ______
Answer and explanation
Answer: D: a tendency to treat even causally unnecessary demonstrated actions as meaningful social conventions worth reproducing, not simply an error in understanding the task's mechanics.
The passage's contrast, apes selectively omit visibly irrelevant steps, children don't, invites an explanation for why children behave differently, and the most defensible one available is that children may be responding to a different signal (social convention) instead of simply failing at causal reasoning. A overstates the finding into a much stronger and less charitable claim than the evidence supports. C is an unsupported leap the passage doesn't test at all. B directly contradicts the passage's entire point, which is built around a documented difference between the two groups.
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