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Question

Difficulty: MediumStrengthen

Match each argument on the left with the evidentiary finding on the right that most effectively strengthens its central conclusion.

  • Agronomists noted that apple orchards sprayed with zinc oxide nanoparticles showed significantly lower rates of calcium-deficiency disorders than untreated orchards, and concluded that the nanoparticles enhance root-to-fruit calcium transport.Phloem sap assays demonstrated an immediate surge in translocated calcium mobility within treated trees even when soil calcium levels remained constant across all test sites.
  • Biologists observed that coyotes inhabiting areas near major highway corridors maintain home ranges 40 percent smaller than forest-dwelling coyotes, and concluded that traffic noise restricts their territorial movement.Coyotes inhabiting suburban corridors where acoustic sound barriers neutralized highway noise expanded their home ranges to match the scale of forest-dwelling coyotes.
  • Researchers found that early childhood bilinguals outperformed late bilinguals on non-verbal executive control tasks, concluding that early dual-language acquisition directly reinforces domain-general inhibitory neural circuits.Longitudinal brain imaging revealed accelerated structural growth in prefrontal inhibitory regions solely following early dual-language exposure, but not in matched monolingual controls.

Answer

Match left_1 (apple orchard calcium transport) to right_1 (phloem sap calcium mobility), left_2 (coyote territory size and traffic noise) to right_2 (range expansion upon noise dampening), and left_3 (early bilingualism and inhibitory circuits) to right_3 (longitudinal prefrontal growth following immersion).
Each evidentiary finding directly substantiates the core causal mechanism asserted in the corresponding argument. For the agricultural argument, showing increased calcium mobility in the phloem while soil levels remain constant confirms the internal transport mechanism. For the ecological argument, showing territory expansion when noise is mitigated isolates acoustic disturbance from physical highway boundaries. For the cognitive argument, showing structural prefrontal changes after language exposure against a control group confirms the developmental causality.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the causal hypothesis and unstated assumptions in each argument on the left.
Argument 1 posits nanoparticle-induced internal transport; Argument 2 posits acoustic noise as the behavioral constraint; Argument 3 posits early language acquisition as the neurodevelopmental cause.
Strengthening an argument requires finding evidence that substantiates the proposed causal mechanism or rules out confounding factors.
2
Evaluate the evidentiary findings on the right to match each with its corresponding causal claim.
Finding 1 validates internal mobilization; Finding 2 isolates acoustic disturbance using a natural control; Finding 3 provides longitudinal neural imaging data tied to immersion onset.
Each strengthener addresses the specific inferential gap and potential alternative explanations of its respective argument.
3
Verify that each pair is uniquely linked and that no cross-application creates ambiguity.
Each domain (agronomy, wildlife ecology, cognitive neuroscience) maps uniquely and unequivocally to its corresponding evidentiary finding.
Ensures unambiguous, logically sound matching across all pairs.

Key Concept

Strengthening causal arguments by corroborating the mechanism of action or controlling for confounding variables.
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