The local fair held its annual photography contest and accepted entries from both amateurs and professionals. ███ ███████ ███████ ██████ ██ ████ ██ ███████ ███████████ ██ ██ ██████ ████ ████ ██ ███ ██████ ██ ███ ███████ ████ ███ ██ █████████
“Explain” questions like this one tend to feature stimuli with two facts that sit in apparent conflict with one another, where the puzzle is to figure out how they could both be true. In this question, the two facts are:
Fact 1: Amateurs tend to be worse than professionals at stuff.
Fact 2: Amateurs won more prizes than professionals.
Because this is an EXCEPT question, you should spend a bit more time than usual brainstorming potential answers – after all, according to the testwriters there are at least 4 good explanations out there.
*Note on the standard: to count as a good explanation, these answer choices don’t need to be bulletproof – they don’t need to completely rule out a world where professionals win most of the prizes. The standard is more like a Strengthen question, where good explanations just need to make the outcome look more reasonable.
Each of the following, if █████ █████ ██ ██████ ██████████ ██ ███████████ ██ ███ ███████ ██ ███ ███████████ ███████ ███████
Many more of ███ ███████ ██ ███ ███████ ████ ████ ████████ ████ ████ ████ ██████████████
This answer choice has Math vibes – we’re playing with the underlying numbers. Most prizes were won by amateurs. Call it 6/10. Now imagine there were 7000 amateurs competing and only 2 professionals. That’d make it much more likely that an amateur photo would beat out a professional one.
The judges in ███ ███████ ████ █████████ ███ ████████ ████ ██ ██████ ███████████ █████ ██ █████ █████████
This introduces the concept of bias to split the concept of a good photo apart from the concept of a prize-winning photo. Perhaps the professional photos were better (as we’d expect), but the judges had bad taste.
Amateurs tend to █████ █████ ████ ███████████ █████ █████████████ ████ ██ ████ █████ ████ ████ ███ █████ ████████
This helps even the playing field between professionals and amateurs. We’d expect professional photos to beat out amateur photos in a fair fight, but what if the professionals have one hand tied behind their back? Perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime shot from Casual Jim could beat out an everyday shot from Supersnap Steve.
Each category in ███ ███████ ███ ██████████ ██ ████████ ████ ██ █████████████ █████ ███ █████ ████ ████ ██████████ ████ ██ █████████
This gives amateurs a huge advantage over professionals in terms of prize count. In fact, assuming they gave out one prize per category (which is how basically all contests work…), (D) makes it a slam dunk that amateurs won more prizes.
Three times as ████ ████████ ███████ ███ ███████ ██ ███ ███████ ██ ███ ████████ █████
This answer choice is very similar to (A). Take a moment to compare them.
(A) succeeds because it gives us a relationship between amateurs and professionals, which explains the difference in prize count between amateurs and professionals.
(E) fails because it merely compares past amateurs to present amateurs without giving us any information about how either of those numbers relates to the number of professionals.
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