My mistake here was discarding the premise about a-acid as context, rather than recognizing it was a floating premise. As a result, I went about this question with POE where none of the answers (other than E and maybe C) seemed immediately better than others.

It’s the way I understood what the answers said and got tripped up with what the question was actually asking. But of all the ways to get a question wrong it might be one of the better ones, easier to address even if it feels like a silly mistake

I think coming up with hypothetical alternative hypotheses to then compare the answers to encourages the wrong kind of thinking. The whole curriculum keeps making the point not to assume and keep anchoring back to the stimulus. Process of elimination is truly the best approach for these kinds of questions in my opinion purely based off of like what answer choice seems the most reasonable — least amount of assumptions, directly relevant to what is discussed/concluded in the stimulus and the connection between the premise(s) and conclusion. To come up with a hypothetical alternative hypothesis and use that to check how to strengthen the argument seems counterintuitive and honestly not worth the time it takes… just my two cents

@jaewill I had the same concern and sort of look at it this way, if the stimulus doesn't explicitly address or grant support in one direction or another (in this case, present time caring more or less about storytelling than in ancient times), than making a comparative judgement is an assumption that we are making beyond what is stated in the stimulus. I keep circling in my notes, when in doubt, ALWAYS go back to the stimulus.

One thing I noticed about this example is that the claim "All cats are mammals. Garfield is a cat." doesn't appear on its surface to be a conditional relationship the way the second example with downtown restaurants does. Just a note for consistency since this example of "X is Y." has been used elsewhere to demonstrate when something ISN'T a conditional relationship. I guess that's the point J.Y. is trying to make here but it honestly just makes me more confused because intuitively you can tell these arguments are different in form.