How to Think About Weird Things Critical Thinking for a New Age 8th Edition by Theodore Schick – Test Bank

How to Think About Weird Things Critical Thinking for a New Age 8th Edition by Theodore Schick – Test Bank

How to Think About Weird Things, 8e (Schick)
Chapter 7 Case Studies in the Extraordinary

1) The best explanation is the one that does best with regard to the criteria of adequacy.
Answer: TRUE
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

2) When evaluating a hypothesis or theory, you must always look at more than just fit with the data.
Answer: TRUE
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

3) The simplest hypothesis is always the best.
Answer: FALSE
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

4) Homeopathic remedies have been clinically proven to be effective.
Answer: FALSE
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

5) According to homeopathy, the smaller dose, the more powerful the medicine.
Answer: TRUE
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

6) According to the text, the best explanation of why some people feel better after taking homeopathic medicine is the placebo effect.
Answer: TRUE
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

7) According to the text, the best explanation of why dowsers’ diving rods move is that the they are being pulled on by radiation from underground.
Answer: FALSE
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

8) There is no other way to explain the fact that people believe they have been abducted by aliens than by acknowledging that they have been abducted by aliens.
Answer: FALSE
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

9) According to the text, the best explanation of the Roswell crash is that it was part of the top-secret Project MOGUL that tried to monitor Soviet nuclear tests.
Answer: TRUE
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

10) The best explanation of why people seem to see ghosts is that there are such things as ghosts.
Answer: FALSE
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

11) It’s simpler to assume that people who claim to have an out of body experience have actually left their bodies than to assume their brain is playing tricks on them.
Answer: FALSE
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

12) People often accept conspiracy theories because they believe that big events require big causes.
Answer: TRUE
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

13) Dowsing is
A) waterboarding.
B) deep sea diving.
C) using a divining rod to discover hidden objects.
D) putting out a fire.
Answer: C
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

14) According to the text, the best explanation of why people believe they have been abducted by aliens is that
A) they have been abducted by aliens.
B) they are suffering from mental illness.
C) they are perpetrating a hoax.
D) they have excessive activity in the temporal lobes of their brains.
Answer: D
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

15) According to the text, the best explanation of why some people experience ghosts is that
A) they are suffering from sleep paralysis.
B) they have come in contact with a disembodied spirit.
C) they have encountered abnormal environmental conditions.
D) they have tapped into information stored in the stones of buildings or outcroppings.
Answer: C
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

16) According to the text, the best explanation of why some people have out of body experiences when they are near-death experiences is
A) their soul leaves their body.
B) there are suffering from abnormal neuron firing patterns in their brains.
C) they are reliving the birth experience.
D) they are suffering from sleep paralysis.
Answer: B
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

17) According to the text, the best explanation of climate change is
A) natural variation in the Earth’s warming and cooling.
B) the use of fossil fuels.
C) the variation in the sun’s energy output.
D) that the claim of climate change is a hoax.
Answer: B
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

18) Which is NOT a criterion of adequacy?
A) simplicity
B) scope
C) scale
D) conservativism
Answer: C
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

19) What is the SEARCH formula?
Answer: Answer will vary.
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

20) What are the criteria of adequacy?
Answer: Answer will vary.
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

21) Hundreds of thousands of people use homeopathic remedies. Does this fact alone show that homeopathy works?
Answer: Answer will vary.
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

22) How much weight would you give to the evidence for UFO abductions and why?
Answer: Answer will vary.
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

23) The UFO-abduction hypothesis is not a very simple explanation because it involves some unsupported assumptions. What are these assumptions?
Answer: Answer will vary.
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

24) In what ways is the communication with the dead hypothesis much less conservative than the competing hypotheses?
Answer: Answer will vary.
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

25) What is the best explanation for near-death experiences? Why is it best?
Answer: Answer will vary.
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation