@StarBrooks Im also aiming for August and just got here! Slow and steady wins the race, don't worry too much about it and just worry about absorbing the information! People who speed through and don't absorb the info are going to do worse than you even if they got here three months ago :)!

@deji The Musicologist will be the Author in this case as the ":" implies that whatever comes after it is what the Musicologist is saying.

@KamrynHerrick D is a premise because it has a support relationship with the main conclusion, and has no supported relationship with any other premise in the passage.

D is restarting a premise that is a supporting fact, so while it is stated conclusively, it is not making a conclusion. It may appear like the statement "In the next 20 years, plane membership will triple", but that cannot support the statement on its own as we have no idea what the capacity of airlines is until the fact is completed.

Is the answer to all of these C coincidentally or is it on purpose to make us be really sure when we pick on the answer lol

Just fell for a stimulus of the 2nd type, where I assumed "thus" meant the final bit was the final conclusion. Never gonna make this mistake again on God.

@IsabellaP No, a causal mechanism is any chain that moves from cause to effect. 3rd factor hypotheses have a causal mechanism, but so does A causes B or B causes A.

For an A causes B lets say, rain causes flowers to bloom the causal mechanism would be rain falls -> moisture soaks into the dirt, the moistened dirt soaks into the roots of the flower -> the flower absorbs nutrients in the soil -> the flower blooms.

@IsabellaP The correlation is "participated in experimental education program" with "performance in school". If you read the breakdown of the question below, the stimulus does not have a causal claim that participation is the reason for this improvement, but the conclusion (that the programs work due to this correlation) is certainly taking it for granted.

"All parents having a background in education" is an alternative explanation that throws doubt on the causal relationship between the program and the scores, and therefore weakens it.

@IsabellaP It depends on what the question is asking of you or what the stimulus says. An alternative explanation is anything that is different from a single explanation. The alternative explanation in Answer D is not countering the correlation, it is proposing an alternative as to why that correlation exists. Instead of A causing B, it is instead B that causes A.

On another question it could very well be that two things appear correlated, but actually are not. An alternative explanation for why they seem correlated but are not would likely be Hypothesis 4 from before, that they aren't actually correlated. Or Hypothesis 3, that it is not necessarily A and B that are correlated with each other, but instead that both A and B are correlated with C.

@IsabellaP The third factor would be the causal phenomenon, and the mechanism would be everything between it and the target phenomenon

For example, the ice cream and drowning statement, the causal phenomenon is warm weather but the mechanism is warm weather =c=> more swimming =c=> more drowning

@FultonHoover Connect back to where it mentions that the hypothesis wouldn't explain the phenomenon in full because it changes the target phenomenon. Their rate of lung cancer would not follow that of the general populace if they do not cease smoking.

@IsabellaP While Correlation does not inherently mean that causation is present, you could almost call it necessary for causation in complex phenomena. If they have a causal relationship, then one moving will inherently have an effect on the secondary phenomena. How could we say that smoking causes lung cancer if rates of smoking moving did not result in movement in occurrence of lung cancer.

Does that make sense?

Who would've thought my middle school math class teaching me the transitive property would follow me all the way here

@misoop I think it is definitely useful for those questions and also for alternative explanation questions where you may need to be able to form your own causal mechanism to find the one that is the most true explanation.

I was almost certain i'd gotten a 0/5 and was happily surprised to have gotten a 5/5 instead. I think I'm getting the hang of this

A little embarrassed I fell into the trap so easily after spending so much time talking about the traps. I think I didn't understand just how tempting that they were when written out in English, rather than how obviously wrong they were in the lessons. Won't make the same mistake again, I hope!

@AnthonyFlores I think it's important to remember that in terms of "Quantifier" All and No are the same concept, one is just positive and one is negative. They are inverse versions of each other that mean the same thing. No alphabets are not phonetic and All alphabets are phonetic mean the same thing!

@ShanR It's there, but perhaps a little easy to miss. In the negating "all" lesson, it says that the negation of "All dogs are friendly" is not "No dogs are friendly", but is instead "Some dogs are not friendly"

5/5! I think I got lucky and got quite a few that were on intersecting sets. I really am feeling the payoff!

This is my first adaptive drill in the foundations section that I got a 5/5 on, I'm super super proud of myself!

I'm proud of a 2/3, but the 1st one really messed with me. I messed up the sufficient and necessary condition so when it came time to Blind Review I was so confident in it that I didn't give it a second glance. I'm glad to see it isn't only me, and seeing a 5 difficulty mark next to it makes me feel a little better all things considered.

Grateful for the blind review, I completely misread one of my questions and only by taking a second glance did I realize what I had done. Got a 5/5 with the blind review because of it!

@DianeDuncan "Only" is a necessary conditions indicator, which would have made the original argument "lift hammer -> pure" not "pure -> lift hammer" instead, you'd want a sufficient condition indicator like "every" or "any". What the argument is saying is not "if you are not pure you cannot lift the hammer", it is saying "if you cannot lift the hammer you are not pure"

However, lack of an indicator doesn't mean that it isn't a sufficient condition. If you are pure of heart you can lift the hammer. Since this establishes lifting the hammer as the necessary condition, if it isn't true, then the sufficient condition cannot be either (hence, not pure).

@StarBrooks Since unless is in the sentence, both interpretations of the sentence are valid. I think when trying to parse an argument, translate a "unless" indicator last so you know which best serves the argument. In this case, since it is followed by "Any barbie who is confident in her abilities", you know you will want to translate it so that it agrees with this sentence unless there is another sentence that confirms Barbie is either not confident or not accepting the role (which there is not).

I almost messed up on 2, for some reason when I read "no creatures with powerful wings" my brain wanted to read it as /powerful wings.

These exercises are super fun, thank you for putting them together!

I got too in the weeds of the Skill Builders and instead of looking for the entire argument structure, I ended up ignoring everything but the conclusion which messed me up.

So grateful to have these breakdowns afterwords to help me see why I got something wrong. I hope to do better on the next one!