Must Be True (MBT) - Key Takeaways

Must be true (MBT) questions have been a weakness of mine that I have been neglecting for a while, but enough is enough! After focusing on this question types, here are some of my key takeaways:

• understand lawgic and the inferences that can be made from them. for example, if a stimulus says A most-> B and A -> C, you can properly infer that B <-some-> C. similarly, if a sufficient condition has two necessary conditions, you can draw a some relationship between those two necessary conditions. e.g.,: good hunters -> can kill up to 1/2 their body weight and good hunters -> have a high muscle-to-fat ratio. you can infer that some (but not all) that can kill up to 1/2 their body weight have a high muscle-to-fat ratio.

• if you aren't understanding the conditional relationships in your head while reading the stimulus, quickly draw them out. I am not saying to do that for every question, but at least for me, some are impossible without it. that said, practice drawing them quickly and how to chain them to make inferences like I described above.

• you cannot take the contrapositive of a most statement (maybe this is obvious to everyone but I was wondering this while drilling a question once and had to confirm afterward)

• a contradiction between two claims in the stimulus does NOT mean you can conclude that one of them is false in the answer choices. what if the other claim is false or ill-founded? we have no idea.

• saying a condition is not necessary does NOT mean it's not relevant. it can still be relevant even if it's not necessary

• a correct MBT question might only address one of the necessary conditions presented in a stimulus that describes multiple necessary conditions. for example, if the stimulus says driving requires being over 16 years old and passing a test, the correct AC might just say "driving requires passing a test". that statement is still true even if it doesn't describe the other requirements.

• while it might seem obvious, make sure you know the wording for the MBT questions so you don't confuse them with most strongly supported. here are the ones that I'm drilling in my brain: "which of the following statements can be properly inferred from the statements above?", "which of the following statements follows logically from the statements above?", and "which one of the following can be logically concluded from the information above?"

I am still working on improving this question type so I will update this list if I develop some more takeaways! Please correct me if you see any errors or feel free to add to this list :) happy friday