The result tentatively suggests that dark matter may not be distributed evenly above and below the Galatic disk. However, the team points out that more pulsar data are needed to verify that finding.
As used in the text, what does the word “evenly” most nearly mean?
The correct answer is (C).
current priority level - we all want this one
What we call the mnm, the “most nearly mean” question, is currently not a frequently appearing question. If you saw 1 on test day, it would not be surprising; if you saw 2 on test day, it would be a touch surprising.(In the previous sentence, if you do not know why the semicolon is doing what a classic semicolon does, click on the link here.)
One idea that can carry the day when it comes to this type of question is that the correct answer should be able to smoothly replace the quoted word within the given sentence. Thinking this, we could maybe think that “smoothly” does not smoothly replace “evenly” as well as “uniformly” does.
A second idea that can be helpful to have on the radar is how the correct answer is often a secondary definition of the quoted word. Whether this is the case here, we can potentially debate. What is not debatable is that the test writers, when writing mnm’s, are selecting words that have multiple meanings.
If you do not know what “haphazardly” means, it likely had little effect on your ability to arrive at the correct answer here. An issue with (D) is that “randomly” changes the original meaning of the sentence.
A primary reason we crafted this question was to clue you in to the existence of the mnm, in case you had not come across one prior. If you feel like we should chat a bit more about mnm’s in general or this one in particular, we’re here for it.