By selecting B I was trying to show whether or not it actually got easier to comply. We need to show whether the RANKINGS improved

@ChristianUmholtz Coming back to this question makes me giggle but sometimes I just think to myself gotta learn the test writers language even if it can be wonky at times lol

Lol this question is irritating because can't people be cruel in similar ways? Like if guillotine had its moment for an era then yeah it would make sense that different rulers were similarly cruel.. do rulers have to come up with new inventive ways to be cruel? To me it makes more sense that the ruler would actually be horrible if they're documented doing things that track with other horrible rulers. Is that not realistic?

Originally chose B because, as a general rule, "some" being inconsistent with evidence typically isn't good evidence against an argument. Most people with cats are happy (large sample size) -> cats can increase happiness, for example. Some people with cats aren't happy doesn't necessarily weaken the argument well because outliers are to be expected. (Bad example but you get the point). In the same way, I thought some paintings being destroyed doesn't change the evidence we have. However, the difference here is that we're saying the sample itself isn't complete, not that there could be outliers

C doesn't get us any closer to whether or not they painted their diets. It's a fact that's disconnected from the conclusion entirely.

Disputing an assumption may not weaken the argument. You can't merely call out assumptions, you must call out assumptions that are harmful to the argument specifically. So what if she was actually aware (which a premise stated she wasn't)? C shows it can still be involuntary, which is why she doesn't wanna be held responsible.

I struggled with D because, in my mind, okay cool then she could be held responsible in the future but what does that have to do with what already happened? However, "should not be held responsible for it" can reasonably include future cases of humming

Disputing an assumption may not weaken the argument. You can't merely call out assumptions, you must call out assumptions that are harmful to the argument specifically

Okay I chose C at first due to the line about how the current approach "contributes little" to real-life understanding; however, indifference is lack of opinion, not uncertainty on the net benefits.

Uncertainty on net benefits = recognize good and bad, more uncertainty about which dominate. I feel like this is more characteristic of the author's opinion because they recognize the traditional approach as greatly lacking without wanting to throw it away

Clinical indifference = no opinion on the effects themselves

The author is definitely not indifferent, just not confident with how much the traditional approach is actually helping. Big difference between that and indifference on the subject matter itself

There is absolutely an opinion on the approach lol, the question is how much the approach is helping

Omg I chose C because I read "presumes" as "fails to consider".. I've done this before too. Big reminder for me on not skimming over that qualifier and inserting what I want to hear

@1766574055qq69 I thought the same thing too! I think the issue is that we can't satisfy the sufficient condition of the negated conditional statement given the premises we have. If we say that the being does not get what it wants entirely through the use of its practical intelligence, we have to presume the necessary condition we are trying to prove. We can't say whether the being gets what it wants through its practical intelligence if we don't first know if it has practical intelligence.

Now if the argument wasn't trying to prove the existence of practical intelligence and this was more of a PSAr question, that negated conditional could be useful I think? But we're simply trying to get to whether it can acquire PI, so our sufficient condition can't require us to label whether something has PI or not when that is what we're setting out to prove.

@colbyyuan566 Doesn't NEED to is key. You can have all the money and not need to learn how to make more, but you could still learn to, yes. Doesn't mean you NEED to

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but here is my thought process for A:

Emotion -> inhibition -> increase in heart rate

A would strengthen the argument because it would eliminate the possibility that emotion is what's increasing heart rate (an alternative hypothesis). However, I struggled to understand why it (emotion does not cause increase in heart rate) is NECESSARY for the argument that inhibition causes heart rate. Couldn't both emotion and inhibition both increase heart rate? That would still allow the conclusion to stand.

I think my issue is in how I frame "NA". I don't think the argument does require that inhibition is a singular sufficient condition for an increase in heart rate, but if emotion is also a sufficient condition (negation of A), then we have NO REASON to believe it was ever inhibition. There goes our support for the argument at hand, even if both emotion and inhibition could theoretically cause an increase in heart rate.

I think I need to expand my understanding of NA questions to simply mean I'm looking for something that would be absolutely devastating for the argument (premises + conclusion)--not necessarily something that is literally "required" for the conclusion. A NA answer choice should strip the argument of its support, which A does (even if both could technically work as sufficient conditions).

@HarryRaftus Yes both these things! The majority of the passage is talking about what "should" and "can" happen, causing me to miss this sentence as specific evidence in support of the author's argument. A is incomplete because it is single directional.

I struggled a lot with choosing D because I thought, "well what about factors other than being marked incorrectly." However, the stimulus tells us that being correctly addressed is enough to have most packages delivered in two days. If most mail is delivered in more time than that, it doesn't matter if other factors contribute to the later delivery because we know that, REGARDLESS of other factors, most correctly addressed mail will still be delivered within 2 days.

For me it clicked when I imagined that most mail in general was correctly addressed. Well that would make most of it being delivered in 3+ days make ZERO sense. Therefore a good amount has to be incorrect at minimum

Chose the correct answer timed, on BR I thought A was doing what D does (instead of it being that we don't know why businesses may have failed, I read it as we don't know WHETHER they did). Specific factors are irrelevant

Big lesson for me here is being more aware of when you're making inferences that seem logical but are still unsupported.

You have basically an unlimited credit card and you have to spend a ton of money financing an empire? Yeah, it sounds logical that you might spend more than you otherwise would have.

But what the passage actually tells us it that not having limitations made it harder to get money.

I think I chose D because I falsely assumed that they didn't pay back their loans because they borrowed too much to do so. However, we have no reason to think they couldn't pay it back. For all we know, they just chose not to because they had the power to do so.

@angantous Yes! I agree-that's precisely why I eliminated E on BR; I do think if it said "any prize" that would be a meaningful way to disanalogize lottery tickets from insurance policies

Okay so I mapped it out as:

Get what you want -> feel pleasure

_

/Pleasure -> /fundamental desire

I was confused because, at first glance, the conclusion just seemed like the contrapositive of a premise + a condition that had some slight shift in meaning (getting what you want is equated to fundamental desire). So I chose E because I thought the conclusion was simply the contrapositive of the premise + a condition that had some shift in meaning (basketball games =/= soccer games).

However, I don't think the "shift in meaning" between getting what you want and fundamental desire is parallel to the shift in meaning I perceived between a basketball game and a soccer game. Fundamental desire is maybe just a subset of what you want; basketball games are not a subset of soccer games tho lmao.

For parallel questions were you are asked to match shift in meaning, the shift itself must be similar from the stimulus to the answer choice in matter of degree, not just the fact that there was a shift. E was not

@AbbigailWood

"To fulfill that need, the core value of beneficence—which does not actually conflict with most reformers' purposes—should be retained, with adaptations at the oath's periphery by some combination of revision, supplementation, and modern interpretation."

Again, no specific revision is proposed, and the main point is that the core of the code should be keep the same, hence why the correct answers are correct, but I don't think #8 A and #10 E can accurately be eliminated for the reasons stated by the light bulb explanation. The author does seem to endorse a theoretical revision, but does not propose one. What he does propose is that the core of the code should remain intact.

For 8 and 10, I am struggling because the author does explicitly endorse potential revisions to the periphery of the code, but not to the core of the code. I would say A can be eliminated now because the author does not propose specific revisions--this is also why I think answer choice E of 10 can be eliminated--but I don't understand the explanation for eliminating these answer choices (being that the author never endorsed modifications in general). Yes, keeping the core of the code the same is the main point--the author even highlights how proposed changes don't actually affect the core of the code--but I think it is a bit reductive to say the author doesn't endorse any theoretical revision at all. The periphery of a code is still part of the code itself, no?

@aabi1020 I was thinking that too. However, it's describing what's outside our "comic bubble" as what we cannot see, which is why I think literal meaning makes more sense. I feel like if it was describing what's outside of our cosmic bubble as what we cannot understand, then I think E, the more figurative meaning, would make more sense

I struggled in between C and E because I identified the MP as pathogens that incapacitate hosts can in fact be reproductively successful (with transmission, i.e., the mechanism for this, as support for that MP). For this reason, I thought E described the support for the MP but not the MP itself.

While I understood that C was incomplete and that the statement virulence needed to also include the bit about transmission, in my mind, it was still the only answer choice that stated the main point. I've found that in the past, an answer choice that covers the most paragraphs is generally a good choice, but it might not be correct if it doesn't include the thesis/what is being supported to begin with. I thought this was one of those instances, hence why I chose C.

Is the strategy here to be more discerning with what disqualifies an answer choice?

@yuyuecarly468 The reason I understand C as better is because it is a chained conditional. Statues, constitutions, and precedents in and of themselves aren't the end goal, restraint on power is. Likewise, relevant and sufficient evidence isn't the end goal, supporting a theory is.

Restraint on power -> statutes, constitutions, precedents -> judicial candor

Supported theory -> relevant, sufficient -> accurate

A is just unbiased -> representative (I chose A too lol). We're missing that a necessary requirement for our end goal has its own necessary requirement.

Could B have been right if it said human beings cannot achieve happiness if they live in a merchant society?

@dancingqueen138 You have to know what de facto and economic segregation separately means