@Lowri Thomas so either way of diagramming is fine? I diagrammed same as you with "K -> J -> /L" but J.Y. has it as K -> /L

@abdullahalkhafaji It's true that from the perspective of the President of Central Supply Company there are only two options but us as the omnipotent reader can catch that mistake and know hey what if the president is wrong? What if there are other ways to prevent any further decrease in profits.

anyways I was able to get to B by being really picky with the answer choices and checking back with the stimmy to confirm when I wrote off an AC, yes I wasn't a fan of the "will increase" but the wording overall is consistent since the other answer choices were focused on politician belief(s) and bringing in unsupported information (written constitution).

So interesting to me that there's not more than 2 comments on this question

I tried to chose the AC that was the least strong between D and E and ended up picking E, this was the only answer choice that I missed after giving the passage a thorough read... I think reading more and understanding differences/similarities in somewhat often used words (like supportive, optimistic, and unreservedly) would have allowed me to see that "strongly supportive" is a degree less strong than "unreservedly (superrrrr no doubt clear as day proud to be the proponent of this whatever it ends up being) optimistic." 

bruh I was like "who's to say action movies are popular??? can't make that assumption.." I need to save that thinking for q20+++!!

Big thing about B is that it's too generalized we're looking for an explanation in regards to this specific recent study, AC E is the obvious choice.

POE'd da hell out of this one. I couldn't even see what the issue was during BR lol I just knew AC stuck most to the stimulus and was most relevant

Having issue's accessing kevin's version.. anyone else?

Did anyone else pick D until you realized there was no clause in the stimulus that satisfied the "If..." cause in the AC???

@FoxGood Wow I did the same thing except I ultimately went with B because I realized D was essentially reversing suff + necc clauses. I did a double-take because of "....thousands of years before any other people are known to have done so.," I thought that perhaps B was too strong. I should've just picked something and moved on though since it took me like 3 minutes to get to B

ain't no way they gave this to me on the 8min 45 sec drill :,) I only got to q4

I was having the hardest time understanding this question. After some thorough review I now understand that A isn't the right answer because it's showing that since one's level of confidence (economist arg essentially) affects how one sees overall state of economy- this AC is essentially supporting the economist's conclusion that the media critics are wrong and that negative news reports don't harm the overall economy, it's actually people's own level of confidence that does. Whereas D is essentially equating that if people have little confidence on the overall economy then that means people then that causes them to negatively think of their own economic situation- which essentially flows with the argument. Maybe the negative news reports DO cause harm to the economy because when impacted with little confidence in overall economy (by negative news reports) people look down at their own situations SO MAYBE the support in the economist's argument just feeds into the the overall point in the critic's argument- essentially not proving that the media critics are mistaken.

I think the only real competition here is between AC A and B. I went with AC A when I was drilling but this doesn't have to be true. we know that talk therapy produces chemical changes in the brain and this this seems to correspond with improvements to the patient's behavior. It doesn't have to be true that all neurochemical changes spur psychological changes. Some chemical changes may spur psychological changes.... that is supported. "ALL" in AC A is wayyyy too strong.

Let's think about AC B here... we aren't given that much support from the premises to conclude that talk therapy may one day be as good as pills. We only have the correlation that the talk therapy leads to chemical changes and that in turn improves patient behavior but the conclusion is bit a stronger than these correlations. It's saying talk therapy due to these correlations will one day be as effective as PILLS. Effectively the argument is assuming a causal relationship between patient behavior and chemical changes. So CAUSE: Chemical Changes ----- EFFECT: improvements in patients behavior. This has to be true for the conclusion to flow. Edit: I also want to mention that pill therapy (pharmacological intervention) impacts the brain's neurochemistry we MUST assume that talk therapy (since it's being compared to pill therapy) is able to do this just as effectively so the conclusion works, AC B without a doubt gives us just that.

Explanation on elimination on the other answer choices:

AC C: Whether or not this is true or false bears no impact on the conclusion. From what we can tell in the stimulus- talk therapy has been effective at bringing about psychological change just not as effective as other methods (a.k.a. pills)

AC D: The second aspect of this AC is what throws me off... neuroscience as a subject is not mentioned in the stimulus and the goal isn't to make it so those two subjects are the same (or indistinguishable) irrelevant AC.

AC E: How much pill therapy or talk therapy costs was not mentioned at all in the stimulus, so the expense aspect of the therapies are completely irrelevant.

@BenPocheron Also- while SA"s certainly can be over-inclusive in their wording... answer choice A is too broad and doesn't fully connect to the stim argument being that The Time Machine can't be classified as Science Fiction. I chose A but looking back at it E is the right over-inclusive answer choice to look for- fits best with the idea of not belonging to SF will also being a "GREAT" dramatic novel. I thought I saw the gap but was too narrow minded and assumed it had more to do with the compelling characters claim.

Honestly- just looking at the last sentence (and cutting out the unnecessary fluff in the beginning) it helps me see what the phenomenon is in the stimulus. For the life of me I was not sure what to explain in this stimulus... I guess rereading over the stim would have been most helpful since it explicitly asks to explain the researchers findings which ends up just being the last sentence.

Looking back at this during BR- this question is so funny. I genuinely couldn't find the issue with this stimulus until I looked at the answer choices- so I wasted time reading it over again attempting to find a flaw but the second time around 1995 caught my eye. Once I saw D I was like yup what about earlier* than 1995? Reviewing it now I realize that Boris does a terrible job at answering George's question. George is asking why the did x get more popular in CURRENT TIMES (now) and Boris goes goes on to say because people are taking more classes and it's catching on... ok? but what SPURRED the uptick + how did it start? Most importantly WHY the change from the past to now. Was there a specific event/phenomenon?

Takeaway: If you spot a gap in an argument that automatically becomes an assumption that is REQUIRED to make the conclusion work. 1. find the gap (control f and type in most relevant word in your pre-phase for me it was "accept") and move on. If you were to have negated this, this crushes the conclusion. You should feel okay clicking onto an answer choice that is "stronger" for NA if it is a gap in the argument, other times you just go for something a bit weaker that must be true.

I think the main reason why AC A is wrong is because we don't know if any of the people chosen for this test have medical conditions. So we don't know if it even applies to those the stimulus mentions.

@Charlize Chen I know you may be long gone from this server but I just want to point out (for anyone like me who is currently out here in the weeds of it all) that However should be a clue that either the argument is shifting to another view, point, argument OR however can act as a concession almost like "that being said here's what I (the critic) really want to talk about" it can be hard to differentiate context from argument but that's what helped me figure it out during BR.

I was really hesitant on choosing C because the idea of a "trait" was hard for me to bring back to the stimulus. I guess let's say the trait AC C is implying is competitiveness ( outdoing others ) This competitiveness creates resentment and doesn't allow for the children to be happy THEREFORE Parents should not encourage their children to place great value on competitiveness. This completely bridges the premises to the conclusion. I chose AC A for my test AC and during BR chose AC B. In both I knew I wanted to bring back the idea of happiness to the conclusion but was really forcing the AC's to fit. AC A is advocating for a different stim than what were given- Who's to say that children when not outdoing others will happily be doing things that they do well... it's really a stretch. How do I know what they will or will not do well on? The stimulus certainly doesn't touch on this. AC B This is not a NA question nor does it connect to the conclusion, we're looking for a principle that further contributes to why Parents should not encourage their children to place great value on outdoing others.

@NinaPaneque Hi nina! For E I translated the AC to "If people do not think they see something (forego not actually present it's just something that makes this AC more relevant to the stimmy) that must mean that they did not expect to see it." I was not able to interpret the AC like this during the actual test but during BR I tried my best to take AC E to an extreme-- this allowed me to actually see what AC E meant. I have no idea how I'd parse it out on the actual exam considering it took me considerable time to come up with a translation. That being said I also narrowed down my answer choice all the way down to D and E during my BR. AC A wasn't good because there was no "accurate verbal description of the suspect" the only time researchers intervened was to mention that the suspect might not be in the lineup not to give the test subjects a verbal description of the bandit. For AC B - It isn't describing what is going on in the stimmy. The researchers never mentioned/ the stimmy never implies that that the researchers (those who ask them for info) stated their expectations so how would the test subjects want to satisfy those "expectations." AC C - Does not match what is going on in the stimulus, the researchers (or person of authority) did not s p e c i f i c a l l y direct the subjects to say anything. AC D- translates to "If people DO NOT fail to recognize the physical similarities among a group of people, then they are given information in addition to visual clues." essentially saying that if a test subject correctly identified the criminal caught it's because they were able to recognize the physical similarities they had with the rest of the group (already odd) and (if able to do so) it was because additional info (like maybe being told the suspect may not be in the lineup) + the video of the crime (if being generous). The stimmy isn't hinting that the suspects shared similar attributes or that there is something else that may account for the misindentifications the stimmy is implying that people are less likely to choose someone out of a line-up if mentioned the suspect may not actually be there.

How about the fact that we don't know if gyms and fitnesses are a "good source" to begin with? The stimmy only says gyms and fitness centers are "sometimes good places to buy used exercise machines" not that those places are good sources... That's how I figured out AC A wasn't the right one. AC C makes sense when describing the type of "place" even tho it sounds so redundant which swayed me to not pick it when I actually took the section.

Misread A and thought it said "Parker has the assertiveness the task requires." BRb ya'll gonna slam my head against a wall

Honestly, I looked at (A) and I was like this can't be the correct NA because we don't know if no (so ZERO) tests out there, intended for diagnosing autism at an early age existed before the new test was made because the stimulus says that the new test for the first time "accurately diagnoses autism in children as young as 18 months old," so there could have been a test out there that diagnosed kids at an "early age" but it was just A-S-S. So the kids could be diagnosed but the test didn't diagnose them correctly. Aside from that.... for NA's it's always a good idea to keep in mind the conclusion--- that leads you straight to (B) your bare bones gotta be true answer. If any diagnostic test that sometimes provides false positive diagnostics (as the test in our stim does!) CAN'T provide a reasonable diagnosis (which is what our stim says (last sentence)) than the conclusion falls apart.