ShmoopTube

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[ musical flourish ]

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And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by the proverbial girl's best friend,

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especially if that girl's into power tools.

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All right, check out the following passage.

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[ mumbles ]

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All right, which of the following statements is accurate?

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And here are potential answers. [ baby coos ]

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[ mumbles ]

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All right, well, we can start by burying answer C.

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By definition, a synthetic diamond can't be made by geological processes.

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It's artificial. Synthetic. Got it?

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We can also rule out answer D,

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because the passage mentions how great diamonds are for industrial tools.

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It does not tell us that synthetic diamonds are used exclusively for that purpose.

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But, uh, we knew that already. Our diamond pit is

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full of synthetic diamonds fresh from Shmoop laboratories.

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[ chuckles ] That's what we make around here.

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That leaves us with answers A and B, which are opposites.

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Two answers enter, one answer leaves.

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Maybe it's not that dramatic, but we do know that only of these answers can be true.

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When we reread the passage, the following sentence tells us

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exactly what we need to know. The important word here is

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"but."

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Thanks to the conjunction fairy, [ bells twinkle ]

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we know that while natural diamonds are extremely hard,

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synthetic diamonds are the hardest. So our answer is B.

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Sorry, nature, but science wins this round.

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To the diamond pool!

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[ crash ]

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