I thought the same thing, but it's wrong because of the extra reasoning the answer choice gives. By adding in "because of their disparate political views" it makes the answer wrong; we don't know why they didn't succeed. If they had just left it as not succeed in fully achieving their goals, I think it would have been true.

For 17 - how does saying "it's hard to represent mathematically" explain a difficulty in modeling? That's like saying "it's difficult because it's difficult." It doesn't explain anything. Sounds a lot more like it's outlining their intuitions (that it's difficult to model / not rigorously supported so it's not commonly discussed)

You are taking the contrapositive of the conditional statement instead of negating it. To negate, we merely have to deny the conditional relationship of "3+ in. snow → cancelled" by showing that it can be the case that there is 3+ in. of snow and class wasn't cancelled (I.e. 3+ in. snow ←s→ /cancelled).

if not sharing info may lead to suffering, then sharing info may prevent suffering

I don't think it's illogical to say that if you remove a cause (not sharing info) then you avoid an effect (suffering). I think because of the weak language they use ("if it's possible that sharing info.." "may prevent suffering") it still holds.

It is annoying phrased and I thought the same thing when doing it live, but the stimulus says it just can't have "more than a trace," meaning there can be a trace.

I feel like D ruins the conclusion and E does not. Can someone tell me how I'm wrong here:

D points out that it doesn't matter the number of times you go on vacation, just the amount of time, so one long vacation reduces stress as much as several smaller vacations. So her conclusion doesn't hold.

For E, the office manager can take into account that a longer vacation reduces stress much more than a shorter vacation, and her conclusion still holds because the stress reduction from several smaller ones cumulatively adds up to the same amount or more than one long vacation. If E instead said "it fails to consider that one long vacation reduces stress much more than many shorter vacations," then that would actually ruin the conclusion. That is the flaw I was originally looking for and thought E was a trap that doesn't address the real flaw.

The argument is that the park's wildlife has not been adversely affected, evidenced by the increase in wildlife. If we took C to be true, we could infer that the increase in wildlife is not because the park's wildlife was not adversely affected, but because the development drove animals into the park, artificially driving the population up. The development could have hurt the park's wildlife and it wouldn't have shown up in the raw population numbers. That interpretation would weaken the argument.

E is a valid flaw that could be a correct choice given a different stimulus. But for this stimulus it's not relevant. The stimulus does not argue that because a conclusion is false the premises are also all false. If it did then this would be a valid flaw to point out.

It's easier to take a step back and put generic labels on these. Think in these terms:

the implied premise: /distinguish -> /accurate = B -> C

the conclusion we want: /recognize -> /accurate = A -> C

We need to bridge A -> B (/recognize -> /distinguish) so that we have A -> B -> C and can therefore validly conclude A -> C

If we put B -> A (/distinguish -> /recognize) as the missing assumption as you suggest, we don't have a bridge to get to the conclusion of A -> C. We would have the implied premise B -> C and this new premise B -> A. The only thing we could validly conclude from that is A some C; we don't have anything to get us to the desired conclusion A -> C.

I interpreted the same way as you, so it ended up just being one long chain rather than two branches. Fortunately doesn't impact the answer.

#feedback

I think the SA section should come before the PSA section, it's way more straight forward / intuitive to build the P->C Bridge and helps set the stage for the weirder PSA phrasings that aren't intuitive at all.

I'd also potentially put it even earlier in the curriculum (after logic). The SA / NA trap is so ubiquitous throughout the curriculum, but it only really hits home in these questions. Having these earlier would have been beneficial as I progressed through the other sections.

I think I'm getting worse at these the more I learn/practice. I feel like when I approach them intuitively it's (relatively) easy and then when try to translate into conditional logic I confuse myself.

Pretty sure the rule just has to match what's in the stimulus. In this case, since the rule in the stimulus is negative (government would not be justified), the rule in the answer should be the same. The stimulus doesn't tell us what would be justified, only talks about what is not justified.

Why would you assume "not significantly less expensive" means it's more expensive? I don't see how that knocks out the alternative hypothesis at all. They could still be cheaper. Even if they're more expensive it could be because they're better quality, which doesn't support the conclusion that it's a status symbol.

Confused how A is wrong on #26. An adequate theory must define the entities of which it is composed. Paragraph 3 is saying the theory is wrong because certain characteristics do not define the entity they merely accompany it. Then paragraph 4 is saying it's not possible to define the entity under the theory of internal relations' assumptions "To know an entity; we must know all of its relationships; but because the entity is related to everything in each whole of which it is apart , these wholes must be known completely before the entity can be known. This seems to be a prerequisite impossible to satisfy."