SAT OwlQuestion bank / Cross-Text Connections
Text 1: Paleontologist Erik Sandvold argues that human hunters drove woolly mammoths to extinction. He notes that mammoths disappeared from many regions soon after humans arrived, a pattern that seems hard to explain as coincidence.
Text 2: Ecologist Mei Lin Zhou analyzed ancient DNA preserved in frozen soil and found that as the climate warmed at the end of the last ice age, the grassy plains that mammoths grazed were replaced by wetter landscapes of moss and shrubs. Mammoth populations shrank along with their habitat. Zhou grants that hunters killed some mammoths, but she maintains that hunting most likely finished off groups that climate change had already reduced to small, isolated populations.
Based on the texts, how would Zhou most likely respond to Sandvold's argument in Text 1?
By rejecting the idea that humans ever hunted mammoths
By agreeing that hunting alone explains why mammoths went extinct
By arguing that hunters may only have finished off populations already shrunk by habitat loss
By claiming that mammoths survived longest in the regions that human hunters never managed to reach
Show answer and explanation
Answer: C
Sandvold relies on timing: mammoths vanished soon after humans arrived. Zhou accepts that hunters played a role but says climate change had already shrunk mammoth populations, so hunting finished off weakened groups. She would reinterpret the timing, choice C.
Choice A overstates Zhou's disagreement. She "grants that hunters killed some mammoths."
Why the other choices are wrong
- A. Zhou grants that hunters killed some mammoths, so she wouldn't deny that humans hunted them.
- B. Zhou credits climate-driven habitat loss with shrinking mammoth populations, so hunting alone doesn't explain the extinction for her.
- D. Text 2 never mentions regions humans failed to reach.
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