PT133.S2.Q20 > Question

SECTION 1 · lr

Question 1 Question 2 Question 3 Question 4 Question 5 Question 6 Question 7 Question 8 Question 9 Question 10 Question 11 Question 12 Question 13 Question 14 Question 15 Question 16 Question 17 Question 18 Question 19 Question 20 Question 21 Question 22 Question 23 Question 24 Question 25

SECTION 2 · lr

SECTION 3 · lr

SECTION 4 · rc

PASSAGE 1

Question 1 Question 2 Question 3 Question 4 Question 5 Question 6 Question 7

PASSAGE 2

Question 8 Question 9 Question 10 Question 11 Question 12 Question 13 Question 14 Question 15

PASSAGE 3

Question 16 Question 17 Question 18 Question 19 Question 20 Question 21

PASSAGE 4

Question 22 Question 23 Question 24 Question 25 Question 26 Question 27

The author accuses Samantha of murdering Jansen, and the support list is long:

Samantha and Herbert fulfill a requirement of the murderer (in office on that day).

If Samantha is the murderer, the police won’t find her fingerprints or footprints; the police didn’t find her footprints, and we don’t know if they found her fingerprints.

If Herbert is the murderer, the police would’ve found either Herbert’s fingerprints or footprints, but they found neither. From this the author draws a valid sub-conclusion that Herbert is not the murderer.

Using this sub-conclusion, the author concludes that Samantha must be the murderer.

Herbert’s innocence has been proven, but why is Samantha the only other option? Other people could have been in the office that day. We can’t assume that just because Herbert isn’t guilty, that Samantha is. To do that, we need to know that these are the only two options.

We were already given conditional rules for Samantha and Herbert’s footprints about what police would or wouldn’t find, and we were given results to compare to those rules. This doesn’t help us conclude that Samantha is the murderer.

Irrelevant. The scene of the crime could have been anywhere.

If this is true, we only have two options to choose from and Herbert has been proven innocent. We can validly conclude that Samantha is the murderer.

We still don’t know who the fingerprints belong to. Also, even if we know that they aren’t Samantha’s, that only fulfills a necessary condition of Samantha as murderer. It doesn’t solve the larger problem: Why couldn’t the murderer be someone other than Herbert or Samantha?

Related to the explanation of (D): This only fulfills a necessary requirement of Samantha being the murderer. It’s possible that the fingerprints don’t belong to Samantha, but someone other than Samantha or Herbert killed Jansen.

PrepTest 133 - Section 2 - Question 20

Difficulty

Analysis

Answer Popularity

Question history

Confirm action