Somebody read "The Righteous Mind."

The reason B is incorrect is because the conclusion contains a conditional that accounts for the uncertainty about technology.

"So if steel-manufacturing plants could feed the heat they produce into thermophotovoltaic generators..."

If it said, "because steel-manufacturing plants can currently feed," B would be an assumption necessary to the conclusion, even though it does not directly concern saving money.

Behold, the elusive "circular reasoning" non-throwaway AC. Rare and skittish creatures, we are truly blessed to see one in the wild.

I'll preface this advice by saying that knowing your weakest categories is a lot less valuable than knowing why they're your weakest categories. I can identify meaningful commonalities between them, but it's only my best guess, and may not be applicable to your case. Do you keep a wrong answer journal? It doesn't have to be a fancy Moleskine or anything, just some record somewhere of your thoughts on what went wrong. I just write mine on 7Sage the "Notes" tab of the question, usually explaining why I picked the wrong answer, why I didn't pick the right answer, and some general takeaway that, if I had internalized before approaching the question in the first place, would have prevented the error. Here's an example.

Princ: society should not restrict the performance of any of the actions of adults or interfere with the likely results except to prevent negative effects on others.

"Which one of the following expresses a view that is inconsistent with the principle stated in the editorial?"

XAC: "The scientist who invented this technology is not the only one who should be allowed to profit from it. After all, there is no evidence that allowing others to profit from this technology will reduce the scientist's own profits."

The principle doesn't apply to this statement. Therefore, the principle and statement cannot be inconsistent. The principle is specifically focused on restrictions placed by society. The statement in the incorrect answer choice I selected was a normative claim that did not directly imply any societal restrictions had been or should be imposed. It makes claims consistent with an implication that restrictions should be imposed, but only that.

CAC: "It is not enough that consumable products containing harmful substances have warning labels. Many adults simply ignore such warnings and continue to consume these substances in spite of the harm it may cause them. This is why consuming such substances should be illegal."

I recognized that this statement suggests imposing restrictions on others' ability to harm themselves and was thus inconsistent with the principle. However, since my reading of my incorrect selection felt also acceptably inconsistent with the principle, but my selected choice doesn't reference harm at all, I chose it over the correct answer.

I should have remembered that this stem doesn't allow degrees of correctness like, for example, a Strengthen question might. The stem implies that there is only one truly inconsistent answer choice. If your top two answer choices in a Princ question both feel inconsistent with the stimulus, you're probably missing something.

The reason I'm spending so much time on this caveat is that reviewing the trends in your "journal" is way more valuable for priority-setting than looking at raw analytics numbers. They're good to know, but like all statistics, they're most instructive when backed up by more qualitative knowledge.

Okay! With that out of the way, CR is a kind of broad category, but flaw, S/W, and P/H questions all share a heavy emphasis on comparative support structure analysis. Quickly sussing out the anatomy of what is and is not conducive to the truth value of the conclusion. If I wanted to target that core competency, I would throw in some untimed drills of those question types. For each question, I would write out the support structure of the argument, the assumptions and gaps inherent to its reasoning, and any faulty logic it might employ. Think, "If I wanted to rebut this argument, what would be my first move?" The idea isn't to flawlessly execute this practice for every question thereafter, but more to encourage the practice of playing around with an argument in your head as you read, eyeing up the joinery, and wiggling around various pieces to see what falls apart. This is the way I approach these question types; it is not the best way and certainly not the only way. That said, I think it's worth kicking around for a few days.

I run a little scan for these questions at the beginning of each passage section. They're always easier to answer while the sequence of the passage is still fresh in your working memory.

What makes B such an attractive answer choice is that the term "free trade" technically appears in the stimulus in two different senses. I don't think anyone believes that the policymakers behind NAFTA wrote (or named) it with the intention of implementing unregulated Smithian free trade. However, the argument itself only references one definition of free trade.

@jkatz1488955 This is about nine years late, but I wouldn't describe the tone in Passage B as "tentative." B is very clear in its convictions, but those convictions happen to critical rather than positive. Since B doesn't state "therefore, this thing should happen," as A does, it feels looser. The point it develops is broad and strictly negative (something like "fingerprint analysis is insufficiently reliable"); it proposes no solutions.

A more tentatively-argued passage would sound closer to, "It's unclear whether the probative value of fingerprint analysis outweighs the risk of its inherent uncertainty."

If the incorrect ACs had been more tempting, this question would've wrecked me.

@kae We can't validly infer D, but we don't need to. The stem isn't asking about what can be validly inferred, it's asking, more or less, "which of the following statements is no likelier to be true, given the information in the stimulus?" This is a Supported-Except question stem; if the AC receives any support from the stimulus, it can be ruled out.

B seems attractive at face value. The passage does not mention regulation of mineral oil at any percentage. Therefore, that "government regulations allow drilling muds to contain 30 percent mineral oil" feels unsupported. However, we know the use of discharges is tightly regulated, and that the percentage of mineral oil in OBM is regularly 30%. Because this statement is made in conjunction with the mention of regulation, we can weakly infer that this percentage is relatedly subject to regulation (this assumption doesn't endanger D because, if the percentage was not at all regulated, then it's certainly allowed). If a practice is tightly regulated, and a condition of that practice is "typical," then that condition is most probably allowed, particularly if that condition is germane to the regulation's purpose.

Now, to your point about the source of the regulation, you're absolutely right. We don't know who's up in there, "tightly regulating" oil percentages. There's a decent chance it's the government, but we can't be sure. However, consider the truth value of D if the regulations resulting in a norm of 30% were NOT made/enforced by the government. We could then infer that the government's regulatory posture was either MORE lenient, or that it takes no position at all. Either way, the government allows 30%.

When tackling this question on the clock, it's a lot easier to realize that E references discharge as continuous, which is contradicted in Passage B.

The commentary underplays E's stickiness as a trap. E addresses the right flaw: the assumption that Tagowa's testimony would have been decisive in the verdict. Furthermore, it allows for a degree of nuance that A does not. Contrary to the answer analysis, E does not reference how credible the jury found Tagowa. E references the significance of her testimony, which means that Tagowa's statements could have been anywhere between in no way damning to just under sufficiently damning, far likelier than A's insistence that the testimony in no way implicated the defendant.

Where E falls apart is its mention of the jury's disagreement. Because a not guilty verdict (and not a mistrial) was declared, we know that the jury eventually reached unanimity. The jury could have disagreed about how significant Tagowa's testimony was, but that assumption is about as unfounded as the one in the stimulus, meaning A references a more reasonable assumption.

@madisonstein AC A: Hinges on "fails to achieve"

The sentence you're referencing contains two instances of historical scholarship:

1 ("successive generations of historians have ascribed different meanings to past events"): Inconsistent, but not necessarily un-objective.

2 ("[relativist claim] that the events themselves lack fixed or absolute meanings"): While historical scholarship, this is a more abstract critique of objective history in general, and is therefore not engaging in the type of historical scholarship that the objective approach applies to.

AC C: This one is simpler. Passage A does describe an argument (or view) held by relativist historians, but it doesn't really engage with it thereafter.

If the last sentence of Paragraph 2 was the subject of a Purpose in Context question, the answer might read something like: "to draw a distinction between the perspective described in the passage and an opposing perspective."

Great question. I was sloppily dissatisfied with A's specificity and was therefore tempted to misinterpret C as saying something it did not.

The broad flaw in the stimulus is that it conflates perfect correlation with correlation. The counterexamples it references are not an "unrepresentative sample population;" they are a subset of the sample population, used to draw an unsupported conclusion. Because "sample population" has a very specific meaning in the context of a study, my handwavey interpretation of the answer was highly preventable. It's not poor but technically correct phrasing, It's just incorrect.

In the style of an RRE answer, A introduces a causal explanation for at least some of the data. It is a narrowed-down but still perfectly valid application of the perfect correlation / correlation flaw.

Next time, I need to recognize that correctly identifying the flaw exposes me to tunnel vision when eliminating answers. I shouldn't be satisfied with a selection if I have to essentially misread the answer to make it fit.

I read the second sentence in a way that led to a misguided answer. I took "knowledge of the best treatment for emergency conditions" to mean, in the ethicist's thinking from the perspective of a doctor,

"we won't know whether this experimental treatment will truly be best FOR THIS PATIENT unless we try it. However, because this is a medical emergency, this patient is unable to provide consent, so we must make a decision on their behalf."

Which is to say, "knowledge of the best treatment for PARTICULAR emergency conditions," not "knowledge of the best treatment for emergency conditions IN GENERAL."

Read in this light, the benefits of research could but are unlikely to NECESSARILY outweigh the patient's right to informed consent, because the weighing mechanism has more to do with patient outcomes than the benefit of research. I therefore chose C.

However, I could've pulled out of this tunnel-vision-informed answer by recognizing that, while C does not invalidate the argument I imagined the stim to represent, it is not NECESSARY to it either. In the scenario I described, the experimental treatment need not be "highly likely" to yield beneficial results, just "likely enough" to create ambiguity.

Hopefully, as time goes on, my eye for discrepancies like this becomes more reliable while I'm on the clock.

@ismailelhassan785648 This is about six years late but I frame this stem as "which of the following, if true, DOES NOT weaken the argument?" It's the same question, but flipped to exclude the scary reference to four different answers.

I think of it like a more inclusive Strengthen question, since the answer can either strengthen the argument or have no bearing on its truth value. Once you've found something that doesn't weaken the argument, bada bing move on, but be careful. Alternative explanations like this question's D can be tricky to spot when you're on the clock.

RELEASE THE LECTURE LINK, COWARD.

I'll never trust again.

@ShanR It's because there was no mention of the computer's being used in the operation of a business. The suspicion condition can only be met after first passing this test.

@NicholasDylewski I assume you're talking about B, since it's the only answer that concerns what should be done instead of what shouldn't be done. B does not present the contrapositive. In conditional logic, it makes the mistaken assumption that negating the sufficient condition must then negate the necessary condition.

Structurally, the reasoning is identical to saying:

"If something is fluffy and cute, then it is a dog. Since this creature is neither fluffy nor cute, then it is not a dog."

The correct contrapositive in this case would be something like:

"If it is not wrong for to play a practical joke, then that practical joke BOTH shows no contempt for the target AND was not perpetrated under the jokester's belief that it would harm the target."

Notice how B reverses the sufficient and necessary conditions in that statement.

@jackmiller There's no "should," only what's right for you, but I think your concerns are well-placed. Realistically, in a test scenario, diagramming is usually only worth the time on the densest problems like heavy must be true and parallel reasoning questions. The mapping here is useful because it tracks a formulaic thought process that might begin with mapping but, through practice, can be performed mentally or even automatically.

@BillyM_ Great news! It is indeed a word.

@AmyMurillo The negation of the conditional relationship A -> B can either be represented either as

A <-s-> /B

or as

A and /B

Both symbolize the same truth relationship between the two statements. In Question 5's case, it just makes more sense to use the second method because the relationship isn't intuitively categorical ("All A are B"). I think the answer is given in both forms to communicate their interchangeability, though the first makes far more sense on first reading.

I don't know about you, but putting it in terms of "worlds" doesn't work as well me. I think it would make a little more sense to write the second relationship as

"In some cases, the record could sell well and you could still not become famous."

@InderpalSingh In Question 5, only the second sentence has a relevant conditional relationship. The first sentence serves a similar purpose to "Andrew is a Jackson" in Question 1.

Our conditions:

Tree that blooms for three or more months (3+ tree)

Amenable to the tastes of the emperor (Amenable)

"Only" gives away their relationship. "3+ tree" is necessary while "Amenable" is sufficient.

In other words, if the tree is amenable to the tastes of the emperor, it must be one that blooms for three or more months, or

Amenable -> 3+ tree

Back to the first sentence. The ume blooms from December to January, meaning it blooms for at most 2 months, decidedly NOT three months.

Since the ume fails the necessary condition, it must fail the sufficient condition.

Amenable -> 3+ tree

ume /3+ tree

----------------

ume /Amenable

The ume is not amenable to the tastes of the emperor.

It's worth noting that a tricky question based around the conditional "Students are cited as "late" only if they arrive more than five minutes past the last ring of the homeroom bell," could lay a trap with with the "more than five minutes" part of the necessary condition. The "more than five minutes" negated is not "less than five minutes," it's "NOT more than five minutes" or "less than OR EQUAL TO five minutes."

While valid, your expansion of the contrapositive argument form is incomplete in a way that might be misleading. It would be be equally valid if it said "Melissa arrived five minutes past the last ring," or, more completely, "Melissa arrived less than or equal to five minutes past the last ring."

@annalior02 Let's look at the initially expressed conditional relationship.

"If an action is performed out of self-interest, then it should not be considered generous."

or, condensed for smoother reading,

"in self-interest -> not considered generous."

Remember, a contrapositive not only reverses the component statements, but also the order of the statements. The contrapositive of this conditional relationship is:

"considered generous -> not in self-interest" or "If an action should be considered generous, then it was not performed out of self-interest."

What can we conclude from that contrapositive? Given the knowledge that some action should be considered generous, then we know for sure that it was not performed in self-interest. However, the relationship in the third and fourth sentences looks different. Stated in the terms of the initial conditional, it reads "not in self-interest -> considered generous." This error is an example of inverting the conditional, or confusing a sufficient condition with a necessary condition.

Returning to the first example given in the video, "If a person is in Texas, then they must be in the United States," the logic structure applied in the passage would conclude that "If a person is NOT in Texas, then they must NOT be in the United States." Nebraskans would have a bone to pick with that logic, and for good cause.

5 tracks, but while reading "the rights of any presently living individual" as "the rights of any living individual to do things that would damage the artistic heritage of future generations" is a reasonable inference based on the context of the claim, it's still an inference. I don't think it should be marked in parentheses as the "correctly expanded" interpretation of the phrase.

A literal reading would interpret "the rights of any presently living individual" as "ALL rights of any presently living individual." Maybe more obtuse than the example stated in the answer block, but given the source text's kind of sloppy writing, still a valid interpretation.