Self-study
Critic: It generally holds true of concert pianists that the more famous the musician, the greater the pleasure of his or her audience. ██ ██ █████ ████ ██ ████ ████ ███ ██████ ████ ██ █████ ███ ████████ █████ ███ ███████ ██ █████████ ██ ███████████ ████ ███████ ████ ████
Objective: Find Support
The critic doesn't make an argument, just states a claim for which we need to find support. The claim is that audiences are reasonable to prefer hearing more famous concert pianists play, and this preference should not make us doubt audiences' ability to judge the quality of the playing. We can extrapolate from this that some cynics might claim that audiences only care about these pianists being famous, and aren't actually paying attention to the quality of their musical skill. The critic's claim denies this viewpoint.
The critic's reasoning can be seen in the phenomenon-hypothesis framework. The critic observes a correlation between pianists' fame and audiences' enjoyment (the phenomenon), and, despite not directly posing a hypothesis, clearly favors an explanation that gives credit to audiences' ability to judge the quality of music. So the critic is almost implicitly hypothesizing that high-quality piano playing goes along with the pianist's fame.
For this reason, we can support the critic's claim by showing that good playing correlates with the fame of the pianist. That would justify the critic's statement by telling us that audiences do actually most enjoy the best pianists, who just happen to also be the most famous.
7.
Which one of the following, ██ █████ ████ ████████ ████████ ███ ████████ █████
a
The fame of ███████ ████████ ███████ ████████ █████ ██████ ██ ██████████
This tells us that there's a correlation between pianists' talent and their fame—exactly what we're looking for! This supports the critic's claim by telling us that audiences' favorite pianists are not only famous, they're also highly talented.
Plausibility
Plausibility
Presenting evidence that corroborates (in Strengthen) or conflicts (in Weaken) with the author's hypothesized explanation or the predictions that follow from that explanation.
b
Some of the ██████ ███████ ████████ ███ ███████ ██ ███ ███████ ███████
If anything, this undermines the critic's claim: if these underground pianists are so talented, why do audiences prefer to listen to famous pianists? This actually does make us doubt audiences' ability to judge the quality of piano playing.
c
In general, the ████ ██████ ███ ████████ ███ ██████ ███ █████████ ████ ██ ██ ███ ███ █████
This is consistent with the critic's statement, but doesn't offer any support for it. Just because famous pianists can draw a crowd, doesn't tell us why audiences are correct to prefer their playing over that of less-famous pianists.
d
Even the finest ███████ ████████ ██████ ████ ████████████ ████ ██ █████ ████████████
This doesn't provide any support, because it doesn't help us to distinguish between famous and non-famous pianists. That means we still can't judge whether audiences are truly correct to prefer the famous pianists.
e
The very best ███████ ████████ █████ ███████ █████ ████ ███ █████████ ███ █████████ ██ ███████████
While this doesn't tell us anything about fame, it does cast doubt on audiences' ability to tell apart good and bad playing, which could undermine one of the critic's claims. What this definitely doesn't do is support the idea that audiences' preferences are justified.