SAT Question d72b325e: Answer & Explanation

Text 1

What factors influence the abundance of species in a given ecological community? Some theorists have argued that historical diversity is a major driver of how diverse an ecological community eventually becomes: differences in community diversity across otherwise similar habitats, in this view, are strongly affected by the number of species living in those habitats at earlier times.

Text 2

In 2010, a group of researchers including biologist Carla Cáceres created artificial pools in a New York forest. They stocked some pools with a diverse mix of zooplankton species and others with a single zooplankton species and allowed the pool communities to develop naturally thereafter. Over the course of four years, Cáceres and colleagues periodically measured the species diversity of the pools, finding—contrary to their expectations—that by the end of the study there was little to no difference in the pools’ species diversity.

Difficulty:Hard

Based on the texts, how would Cáceres and colleagues (Text 2) most likely describe the view of the theorists presented in Text 1?

It is largely correct, but it requires a minor refinement in light of the research team’s results.

It is not compelling as a theory regardless of any experimental data collected by the research team.

It may seem plausible, but it is not supported by the research team’s findings.

It probably holds true only in conditions like those in the research team’s study.

SAT Question d72b325e: Cross-text Connections answer and explanation

Text 1

Text 2

Explanation

Why the other choices are wrong