Let me put the translations here so maybe someone can see the answer better:

“A factor”: a slipped or bulging disk

“Effect/ certain effect”: back pain

“A phenomenon”: the absence of a slipped or bulging disk

“A characteristic”: no back pain despite a slipped or bulging disk

Once I started putting these in for the abstract terms in my mind, everything started to click so much better.

After rereading my Answer A explanation, I realize I explained it poorly. I apologize.

@kisabelo46998

So for me, the best thing I did to start figuring out these NA questions is realizing that all the answer needs to do is keep the conclusion from being wrong. It doesn’t matter how strongly or weakly it supports or improves the argument, it just has to make sure the argument isn’t pointless. If the argument still makes sense even after you negate the answer choice, then it isn’t necessary. A necessary assumption is the bare minimum the argument needs to survive. If you negate the argument’s necessary assumption, then no matter how overwhelmingly strong its premises are, it still falls apart. Honestly, negating each answer choice in an NA question as I read them is single-handedly helping me understand them. I’d recommend negating them as soon as you read them through once and thinking about how the argument would still stand if you slotted that in as a premise.

In this drill, there’s the question about rattlesnakes and their molting. This was a level 5 “curve breaker” question (more people answer wrong than right) that I answered in 30 or so seconds (not a flex because I got one of the easy ones wrong after spending a little over 5 minutes trying to understand it :/ ) because of realizing that the other answer choices plainly dont matter in the face of the argument’s original premises.

The right answer was the only one that didn’t let the argument fall apart. The argument said, in TLDR, ““Rattlesnakes break their tails too much for us to use it to accurately age them. If they didn’t break their tails as much, we could age them, because their molting accurately tells their age.”

Answer A said the snakes molt once a year. If this were false, then nothing would happen to the conclusion. The original premises still fully support the possibility of the conclusion, and adding or taking away SPECIFICALLY how many times they molt doesn’t interrupt that. It doesn’t matter how often rattlesnakes molt, only that it can be used to tell their age. If one rattlesnake molts once a year and another molts 4 times a year, then how are you supposed to use that to tell their age? What about rattlesnakes that live in different habitats? Does exposure to the sun cause them to molt more even if they’re the same species? Answer A isn’t necessary to hold the argument together, because even if it was false the conclusion still has the full support of its premises.

Answer B says that all rattlesnakes species have the same rattles. This was honestly an answer that almost tripped me up because after negating (rattles of all snakes are NOT identical) I thought that, if this was false, then there’s no way you could accurately age the rattlesnakes. But that comes from an assumption that I made: “all rattlesnakes must have exactly the same tails in order to age them.” Nowhere does the argument state anything remotely close to that. Besides that, what does this do to the argument? The premises still fully support the conclusion even when this is negated. Rattles looking different does nothing to undermine how many sections it has. Rattles looking different does nothing to undermine how many times that snake molts.

Answer C says young snakes molt more frequently. What in the argument cares about the frequency of molting based on age? What does this molting have to do with their rattles being brittle? If this is negated, meaning “rattlesnakes DON’T molt more frequently when young,” what does this do? They can still be told apart by their rattles if they didn’t break off because all rattlesnakes MUST then have the same molting frequency so this is irrelevant.

Answer D is just flatly irrelevant. I don’t even know how to properly explain why this is wrong. Nothing in the argument would care if this were true or false. I genuinely have no other explanation for this one.

Answer E says they molt as often when food is plentiful as when food is scarce. What if this wasn’t true? Throw it into the argument as a premise:

“Rattlesnakes break their tails too much for us to use it to accurately age them. Rattlesnakes don’t molt as often when food is scarce. If they didn’t break their tails as much, we could age them, because their molting accurately tells their age.”

Turning Answer E around shuts down the entire argument. How can you accurately use their molting to age them if the amount of times they molt is completely variable? One snake could look 10 years old and only be 1 month old because they have so much food. One snake could be 10 and only look 1 because their food is scarce. How do you age them if they molt randomly? This is precisely why E is NECESSARY. If it wasn’t true, the argument couldn’t possibly be true, as its premises, no matter how powerful they are, cannot overcome this single issue.

This was super long, I just wanted to explain my tools that helped me. I have gotten almost every single NA question correct, and it’s really only because I read every single answer choice in negation rather than as its real wording, and pick the one that contradicts or completely explodes the argument. There may be two answer choices that seem like they do that, but that’s when you really have to think: “Am I assuming something? Am I supplying information that isn’t included or can be inferred from the stimulus?”

I’m genuinely surprised that that last question is mega difficult. I thought it was a level 1 difficulty. I don’t know why, but something clicked for me on that question super easily and I answered it in like 30 seconds.

Meanwhile… The old people deference question I spent a ludicrous 5 minutes on and STILL got the wrong answer lol

I crossed out the two starting with “rational consumers” without reading the rest because I thought that it narrowed the possibilities too much, we’re concerned with consumers at large, not just rational consumers.

I crossed out B relatively quickly once I realized it just said: “When irrational to acquire information, it would be irrational to acquire information.” Once I read it like that, I realized “oh wow, this is saying and doing absolutely nothing.”

I had E as my chosen answer at first, and then I really thought about what the conclusion was and how exactly E could make it work.

The conclusion is if there are sentient beings, it is impossible for us to know unless they are as INT as us.

Why does their INT matter? At first glance, I thought E because of course in order to communicate with us they need to be at least as INT, so “bridge” made.

But the conclusion doesn’t have anything to do with other beings communicating with us, it’s whether or not we can detect them. If they can’t be detected through comms, then they’re not as INT. But what ELSE is stopping us from detecting them? The fact that we can’t send spacecraft out.

That’s what led me to pick D in the end, it’s the only answer that tells us that we cannot detect them if they’re not as INT because we don’t have the spacecraft to do so either.

To maybe better break it down (and include D as a premise):

P1: No spacecrafts currently possible outside Sol

P2: If any being outside Sol was capable of comms, it would need to be at least as INT as us

D: If communications are impossible, then we must use a spacecraft

(D connection: Since spacecraft option is currently impossible according to P1, they need to be able to communicate with us which means they MUST be at least as INT as us, which is what the conclusion states)

Conclusion: THUS, if there are beings outside Sol, we can’t determine that if they aren’t as INT as us.

A: the conclusion isn’t concerned with ANYTHING inside Sol, only outside, so this doesn’t guarantee the conclusion.

B: aliens “wanting” to communicate doesn’t do anything for the conclusion which still says WE can’t detect other beings, so I crossed it out immediately.

C: This reads like a more complicated and reworded P1 which doesn’t guarantee the conclusion. P1 says no spacecrafts, answer C says part of P2, also no spacecrafts

E: It doesn’t concern itself with the main point of the conclusion, which is we can’t detect aliens unless they’re at least as intelligent as us. E reads a lot like a different wording of P2, which doesn’t help to guarantee the conclusion.

Hopefully this helps somebody.

#feedback

Please stop putting questions from practice into the drills at the end. Two of these questions I didn’t even go through because they were questions I already immediately knew the answer and the explanations from because we JUST reviewed and answered them like half an hour ago. Sure I could review the question and redo all of my analysis on them, but a fresh question would be much better since I have to rationalize the right answer rather than already knowing what it is and giving me a predetermined bias to that answer.

@goldilocks @goldilocks Same. That’s why I almost chose the answer about the largest stones at the site. It’s only a level 2 question but I had to read the answer choices 4-5 times just because I was getting hung up on the weight of the rocks and ignoring everything about the boats themselves. Easily got rid of C because that’s entirely unimportant and also easily E because again, doesn’t matter. But that weight dissimilarity almost caught me. I was so convinced that the weight was going to be the issue. After rereading the stimulus again and trying to picture the example, I realized that they’re talking about traditional boats versus prehistoric boats and that that is ALSO a major issue. I didn’t choose the largest rocks answer only because I couldn’t see how best to tie it in with the support when answer A was blatantly something that was wrong.

I thought this was a weakening question… I feel so stupid. C is the PERFECT answer for weakening the argument, but this was strengthen. My brain is mashed potatoes. I read the question stem twice and still apparently thought this was a weakening question.

The frustrating part of the answer choice of "oldest mistake in the book" is that technically B is correct, if 250 or more than self-sustaining. BUT that doesn’t follow with what the ENTIRE stimulus says.

The stimulus says that current habitat is holding 70-100 and can't support more. 250 would mean self-sustaining, but the underlying implication is that all 250 must be in the same habitat, which we are directly told they can’t. 70-100 all on the same habitat isn’t enough, so if the total population reaches 250 but 70-100 are together in Florida and the remaining populations are in captivity in other places, then they’re not self-sustaining EVEN THOUGH there’s 250+. Therefore it’s impossible for the current population to reach the desired number if there isn’t more habitat.

This line of thinking has helped me a ton in understanding why mixing the sufficient and the necessary causes problems. It will present itself as a right answer because it technically is something the argument says, but it doesn’t FOLLOW the argument.

#feedback - In dark mode, the wording in the spectrum graphic does not clearly appear

@robbietonie It truly does not. I'm sitting here trying to understand how sets play into this and it's not adding up.

If every single A is a B and over half of those Bs are Cs, then it's extremely possible that "scooping" the B will also give you an A. This flaw is incredibly difficult to put into "sets" and "buckets."

So negating isn’t saying no to the argument, it’s just saying “you forgot to look at it this way.” If you’re saying “it’s not the case that some unicorns poop rainbows,” then what you’re saying is there are no unicorns that poop rainbows. If not some, then none. You can’t say “if not some then most” because that’s not negating but adding onto the original claim. You can’t say “if not some then all” because again, that’s saying more than what the claim gives you evidence for.

Instead, negating is just saying “aha you forgot that there are some unicorns that DON’T poop rainbows!” A better view, for me, of negation is not “denying” or “negating” the original claim, but thinking of the possibilities that the claim didn’t originally consider.

In my reversion to English, I keep forgetting to include ties. I have “no island is more tropical than any other” but exclude there could be a tie. I did the same for small and large animals and chess is the most appropriate.

To me, the negative of the animal claim is “not all small animals are faster than large animals.” I don’t see how the claim is saying that large animals are faster.

I’m also not understanding why we negate these claims if they aren’t logically equivalent to their original statement. It’s like we’re being asked to forget everything that the argument says and make our own conclusion with no evidence to back it up. It just seems irrelevant but I’m probably wrong.