Q3

[chocolatebunny]

I don't understand why B is the correct answer choice for this question. I wasn't happy with any of the answer choices but ultimately ended up picking D. Here was my reasoning for eliminating all the other choices.

(A) The whole passage is about neurogenesis so eliminating this one was easy.
(B) Aah! I eliminated this one because of the information provided in the third paragraph. Specifically lines 30-33 and 43-47. The only reason I can think for this being the correct answer choice is that the author doesn't explicitly talk about the body weight of canaries but rather just about the size of their brain.
(C) Supported by lines 55-58.
(D) Since the second paragraph talks about how long the memory of the repertoire of song for canaries last, this was easy to eliminate too.
(E) Finally, since the second paragraph also talks about the canaries learning how to sing. It was easy to imagine a parallel between this and humans learning complicated tasks.

[ohthatpatrick]

I think you nailed it.

(D) and (E) come from line 52-54.

(C) comes from 55-58.

(A) comes from 48-52.

(B) is not supported well, because we never talk about either species' ratio of brain weight to body weight, or, as you mentioned, about canaries' body weight in general.

The 3rd paragraph mentions that canaries' brains fluctuate in weight, as an indication that neurons are lost and then created anew in a seasonal cycle.

If (B) had something like:
(B) Whether humans' brain weight fluctuates throughout a human lifetime

THAT would be close to what was being described in the 3rd paragraph in regards to canaries.

Hope this helps.

[uhdang]

Just want to add my two cents on this. I chose B) for a similar but slightly different reason, while I see why "ratio" is the scope to look out for.

The passage says that body weight matter of canary is important because of their requirements of flight. The author states that neuron size and number of cells fluctuate in order not to be too heavy for canaries to fly. So, I thought that this application wouldn't matter to human neurogenesis because humans simply can't fly. And that's how I chose B).