Reading Comprehension: Inference Questions

Which of the following does the author suggest about endotherms' responses to heat and cold?

Incorrect.

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This answer choice incorrectly presumes that excess cold cannot have a drastic and detrimental effect on endotherms. However, although endotherms have more trouble coping with excess heat than excess cold, there is no information in the passage to suggest that detrimental effects on endotherms are necessarily caused only by excess heat.

Incorrect.

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The second sentence of the first paragraph tells us that an endotherm raises its metabolic rate to produce heat. However, we have no information to suggest that it does the obverse to dissipate heat.It is possible that the endotherm may maintain the same metabolic rate, and dissipate its excess heat by other means; the passage does imply otherwise.

Good work!

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Since endotherms produce some heat as they dissipate it, the process of dissipating heat is less effective than its counterpart. Thus, an endotherm will be better able to react to a temperature which requires heating than to a temperature which requires heat dissipation (since the animal would be heated more efficiently than it would be cooled).

Incorrect.

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Although it is true that an endotherm responds to excess heat less efficiently than it responds to excess cold, the relative amount of heat and cold matter. It would not be correct to make a blanket statement, as this answer choice does, that any amount of excess heat (even a small amount) has a greater effect on an endotherm than any amount of excess cold.

Incorrect.

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The fact that the dissipation of heat is not as efficient a process as its production only means that an endotherm must spend more energy dissipating heat than it would producing it. Moreover, if endotherms really could not dissipate heat, the author would not say in the first sentence of the passage that endotherms' internal temperatures do not vary by more than a few degrees centigrade over the animals' lifetimes.

Since endotherms respond to excess heat in a less efficient manner than they respond to excess cold, the drastic and detrimental effects upon them caused by modern climate change are a result of a warming climate.

The manner by which endotherms dissipate heat, unlike the manner by which they produce heat, is not effective in accomplishing its intended goal.

Because of the inefficiency with which an endotherm responds to excess heat, it is more sensitive to excess heat than it is to excess cold.

An endotherm would be better able to react to a temperature a certain degree colder than its preferred temperature than to a temperature the same degree higher than its preferred temperature.

An endotherm faced with temperatures above which it gains heat from the environment would dissipate that heat by lowering its metabolic rate.