The air quality board recently informed Coffee Roast, a small coffee roasting firm, of a complaint regarding the smoke from its roaster. Recently enacted air quality regulations require machines roasting more than 10 pounds of coffee to be equipped with expensive smoke-dissipating afterburners. The firm, however, roasts only 8 pounds of coffee at a time. Nevertheless, the company has decided to purchase and install an afterburner.

Which of the following, if true, most strongly supports the firm’s decision?

People who do regular volunteer work tend to live longer, on average, than people who do not. lt has been found that “doing good,” a category that certainly includes volunteer work, releases endorphins, the brain’s natural opiates, which induce in people a feeling of well-being. Clearly, there is a connection: Regular releases of endorphins must in some way help to extend people’s lives.

Which of the following, if true, most seriously undermines the force of the evidence given as support for the hypothesis that endorphins promote longevity?

The Eurasian ruffe, a fish species inadvertenfly introduced into North America’s Great Lakes in recent years, feeds on the eggs of lake whitefish, a native species, thus threatening the lakes’ natural ecosystem. To help track the ruffe’s spread, government agencies have produced wallet-sized cards about the ruffe. The cards contain pictures of the ruffe and explain the danger they pose; the cards also request anglers to report any ruffe they catch.

Which of the following, if true, would provide most support for the prediction that the agencies’ action will have its intended effect?

Thyrian lawmaker: Thyria’s Cheese lmportation Board inspects all cheese shipments to Thyria and rejects shipments not meeting specified standards. Yet only 1 percent is ever rejected. Therefore, since the health consequences and associated economic costs of not rejecting that 1 percent are negligible, whereas the board’s operating costs are considerable, for economic reasons alone the board should be disbanded. Consultant: I disagree. The threat of having their shipments rejected deters many cheese exporters from shipping substandard product’

The consultant responds to the lawmaker’s argument by

Although the school would receive financial benefits if it had soft drink vending machines in the cafeteria, we should not allow them. Allowing soft drink machines there would not be in our students’ interest. lf our students start drinking more soft drinks, they will be less healthy.

The argument depends on which of the following?

Which of the following most logically completes the argument?

Sviatovin is a medieval Moringian text whose author and exact date of composition are unknown, However, the events in the life of Prince Sviatov that the text describes occurred in 1165, and in the diagram of Sviatov’s family that accompanies the text his father, who died in i167, is identified as still living. Thus Sviatovin must have been written between 1165 and 1167, assuming that ________________.

Although there is no record of poet Edmund Spenser’s parentage, we do know that as a youth Spenser attended the Merchant Tailors’ School in London for a period between 1560 and 1570. Records from this time indicate that the Merchant Tailors’ Guild then had only three members named Spenser: Robert Spenser, listed as a gentleman; Nicholas Spenser, elected the Guild’s Warden in 1568; and John Spenser, listed as a “Journeyman cloth-maker.” Of these, the last was likely the least affluent of the three-and most likely Edmund’s father, since school accounting records list Edmund as a scholar who attended the school at a reduced fee.

Which of the following is an assumption on which the argument depends?