@Tumptytumtoes I think "Beethoven, of course, has stood as a cultural icon for more than a century, but that didn't happen overnight. His most challenging works did not become popular until well into the twentieth century" helps to situate Fidelio (as one among Beethoven's works) as being appreciated later. We don't know for sure that Fidelio was among the most challenging works, but at least we know they were part of Beethoven's works, and that Beethoven became appreciated ("cultural icon").

@sxphs no I think we can only eliminate conditional ACs if:

• the Sufficient Condition does not trigger (ie, the premises don't give us the information we need to meet the condition of IF xxxxxx) - this is the case in AC (B) because we don't know from the premises that "the ailment rarely occurs except in cities in which there are large amounts of soot in the air")

• the Necessary Condition is not relevant (does not establish the conclusion of the argument) - not the case in AC (B) but it is the case in AC (D)

@Isabella! I also eliminated C on my timed and blind review. I thought it meant we could toggle soot on/off, but maintain correlation of Other Air Pollutants and Ailments, so that essentially it was saying Soot had no effect. (ie, could be presence of cause (soot) with absence of effect (frequency of ailment).

Now knowing C is correct:

The "at least as high" is establishing a minimum floor, ie there IS an effect (frequency of ailment present).

I think "as high as anywhere else" means "as high as any city, including those with the top frequency". That is, when there is HIGH soot but LOW other air pollution, there is ALWAYS high frequency of ailments (at least as high as the top frequency). This weakens the independent correlation between other air pollution and frequency (i.e. without soot), suggesting other air pollution does not causally contribute to frequency, strengthening the possibility that it IS soot that is a causal factor (which weakens the argument).

For E) I read the two roles as both referring to the causal mechanism of interest/desire/motivation --c--> Intensive Training --c--> development of superior performance.

Explanatory: sustained intense training usually depends on interest and desire. In support of this explanation, evidence is given for what is "more often" true for superior performers. ie, the paragraph explains the causal mechanism behind sustained intense training, which leads to superior performance.

Predictive: as JY explained, motivational factors are likely to be predictors for superior performance

@Kevin_Lin Thank you for the reply. Yes, that makes sense and helps a lot.

Parsing language and sentence structures isn't always helpful; it is better to conceptually identify the condition (time, place, quality, feature) under which something else takes place.

I'm pretty sure that was a major tip in the core curriculum with the Group 1-4 indicator words, but I didn't realize how much I still relied on them. It is very helpful to have the need for conceptual understanding of a sentence reinforced here, where there are no indicator words to fall back on.

Thanks again!

@Kevin_Lin Thank you so much! The [subject - sufficient][predicate - necessary] is very helpful. And I'll remember not to get thrown off by the "that" as long as the other conditional indicators are there.

How about for the stimulus "But an artwork cannot express an emotion that the artwork's creator is incapable of experiencing"? There are a a couple nouns (artwork, emotion, artwork's creator). The primary subject is [artwork] and the predicate is [cannot express an emotion]. But the conditional element is about type of emotion (ie, the kind that can be expressed or not, based on the condition of whether the artwork's creator is capable of experiencing it).

Is there a common way to spot the conditional elements and their relationship in this kind of statement?

Thank you Kevin! I really appreciate this Fast Track series; so helpful to cement concepts and understand patterns.

I am wondering if you could add a video / explainer series on "that" as a conditional indicator. For #6, the stimulus and ACs A, C, and E all use "that" to define subsets and what we know about them.

I can sort of intuit the right relationship sometimes but not always. I can also take the time to identify the sufficient and necessary condition elements and then figure out which is sufficient and which is necessary by trying out out both and thinking through which one makes more sense. But it is very inefficient.

There must be better ways to recognize how the "that" structure is used to signal conditional relationships. Can you enlighten us??

@Kevin_Lin yes, a Fast Track - Negation video would be super helpful! Especially where negation leads to double negatives; how we can read them in a way that makes more sense.

Such a helpful explainer with great take-away tips; thank you Kevin!

One question: in Question 4 re: macaque monkeys, you mentioned that B is easy to negate because you can just take away the "not" in a sentence that is "Subject is not Predicate", ie negated AC becomes "Subject is Predicate".

Is it it always okay to do that, or are there some parameters around when we can do that? (for example, if the Subject is singular not plural)?

Or are there cases where just dropping the "not" may not work how we need it to for a negation test? Ie, where taking a way the "not" needs to be a "some" instead of "all" relationship? ie, "Subject is not Predicate" needs to be negated to "Subject is SOMETIMES Predicate" or "Some Subject(s) are Predicate" to properly evaluate whether it breaks the argument?

@dbershadskaya801 Great explanation with walk through of the whole thought process! One small note thought: the negation of "know a lot → /freely performed" is not "know a lot → freely performed", but rather "know a lot <--s--> freely performed". The negation you used worked out in this answer choice, but I wonder if it could be problematic in another question?

@Robert Carlson Thanks for this explanation and linking back to the Negating Conditional Statements lesson.

I found JY's lesson understandable once we translated "Not (KLE --> /FP)" to "KLE and FP" but was confused how we got to KLE and FP. Negating a conditional yields a some statement, ie "Not (A --> B)" is "A <--s--> /B". This is noted in your text “we know at least there are some situations out there”.

Questions:

1) How do we get from “A <--s--> B” to “A and B”?

a) Is “A and B” just saying that this combination is possible?

b) Under what circumstances are “A <--s--> B” to “A and B” equivalent, or not equivalent logical statements?

2)  Since A <--s--> B is a some statement, how can this be used for a “Two Split Most” or “Two Split All” conditional?

3) The some statement would yield J --> KLE <--s--> FP. How can we draw inferences from an All before Some statement?

#feedback: the Fact v. Belief v. Knowledge link is broken

I struggled with this one and was unsure why B and D would not be right. I understand now it is about clearly identifying the subject that the adjective "peevish" applies to: Allen's depictions, not the artists depicted.

#feedback: The explanation for AC (B) is nested under AC (A)

Also the diagrams in JY's video would be helpful in the summary and ACs!

I appreciated Kevin's video explanation to understand why Confidence matters in this situation, though it seems to be outside knowledge. I would have thought that the premise that Confidence is NOT correlated to Accuracy, together with a reasonable assumption that Accuracy is what really matters in identifying a suspect, would imply that Confidence doesn't matter. So I looked for answer choices that focus on Accuracy.

I recall in the Core Curriculum that some premises can be extra fluff for distraction and are not used in support of the Conclusion. I assumed that the second sentence, [Factors can affect confidence without altering accuracy] to be an "extra fluff" extension of P1.

How can we tell the difference between a "extra fluff" sentence and a key premise on which the argument relies?

@Jsonf This is awesome. I had chosen D and then watched J.Y.'s video and my takeaway was "who cares". This emphasis on the love of 6 pets helped to solidify why D is irrelevant.

I was hoping for an update in the discussion about the horses

It doesn't change the conclusion of the court, or our general understanding of this passage, but just FYI, I think the reference to "prevented, by circumstances beyond their control, from exercising a tradition for a given period of time" refers not (only) to the 1910 treaty, but also since the occupation of the territory by Russia in the late 1700s. It is quite possible that there were still elders in 1991 who could recall those practices before 1910. However, for sure, practices before the late 1700s would not be within "living" memory but nonetheless passed down through oral histories or other means. Traditions (likely over hundreds or thousands of years) that were commonly practices but disrupted by the circumstances of Russian occupation (for 200 years) should still be considered by common sense as "traditional".  (I work in this field). 

@allyldh I agree - I thought it was too easy to pick A just by reading the questions stem and answer choices; the others didn't seem to make sense at all when the question stem just describes access. Then I looked carefully through the passage again to see if there was something more directly connected to any of the ACs and came up blank. I was wondering if I was missing something in how to approach the question until the explanation video/text essentially says to eliminate any ACs that require an unsupported inference.

I chose B because I read "zoologists classified" in the past tense, as referring to the classification as horses, and I thought the now-accurate classification and "rightful place" as as giraffes was the author's opinion, not zoologists. But that missed recognizing that "further studies showed" implies that zoologists did this and correctly classified them as giraffes, some time in the past.

Also, I now realize that the question stem is not asking us to identify any inaccurate statements, but rather not-explained statements.

Like some of the older comments/questions about correct AC (E), I had also thought "choosing to move on and sample other leaves" was an explanation. But now knowing that it is the correct AC, I can see how that phrase can be read more of an expansion/detail about the way that okapis leave preferred foliage uneaten, rather than an explanation for why.

Super appreciate the pro tips!

I did not see that myself, but I think you are right? Unless the wording is some kind of bi-conditional that I am not understanding!

In my shallow dip, I saw C was logically equivalent was 100% confident about it, and moved on.

But I see now how the ACs can be tricky... E is "more similar" in reasoning structure than C. So for the future, we still need to dip all the answers...

I  got this right quickly but I think only because it followed right after the previous question. If I wasn't already looking for the same concept, I may have been flip-flopping with D, and unsure of when to take a charitable interpretation of an author's premise, and when it would be strawmanning. Here, it seems to me to be a reasonable weakness (it's true that it's an assumption), so it didn't seem "over the top" strawmanning. 

I think for future, I would think, ok, even if the author DID strawman the argument a bit, that still leaves a major flaw of having not proven his own argument of NOT the case that [making govt changes --c--> eliminate social ills]. 

#feedback, I think "daily" in the summary of Answer Choice D should be "duly"