bad question

What about all of the items moving around in the room for ac A. I picked D because A seemed to be people with nonconflicting info in both rooms whereas D was saying yes both these people have nonconflicting info so of course one of them isn’t likely to have more motion sickness than another (aka getting rid of alternate hypothesis by saying that when they are both not getting conflicting info no one is more likely than the other to get motion sickness).

You articulated my reasoning better than I could have. This is exactly what I thought. I thought the gov was putting up an umbrella saying "listen there is no evidence that could have helped the defendant, so claiming we destroyed something is useless because either way (if we did or didn't) it doesn't matter since at the end of the day nothing could have helped the defendant." This interpretation lends itself to E bc then if this is true, then the assertion by the attorneys that the gov destroyed evidence that 'would have supported the defendant in the case' is categorically wrong because there is NO evidence that would have supported the defendant no matter what was or wasn't destroyed.

I picked A because even if their translation techniques are inaccurate, that doesn't mean their studies are. Two alternate methods can shed light on this. For example, a study done by pure observation. This would require no translation and could still lend the scientists to a valid conclusion, we use studies by observation exclusively with things like animals. The second method comes down to a work around of the translation issue. What if you had someone that spoke both the scientist language and the subjects language without translation issues. This would maintain the idea that the scientist and subjects couldn't speak with one another accurately but would allow them to still communicate effectively through a third party. This is why I couldn't justify getting rid of A even on blind review because it seemed irrelevant since i could think of two fairly simple ways to still draw the conclusion without compromising AC A.

AC C seemed to obvious to be correct so I went with D

If the stimulus had said "...brightness correlates with other characteristics OF THE STAR..." then I see how D would be correct, but there are just so many things that can be classified as a characteristic (the size of the galaxy or how many celestial objects orbit the start) that don't have to do with the star directly that D doesn't have to be necessary.

I don't understand how D is correct. Why do the characteristics NEED to be from the star itself? Couldn't there be characteristics such as what time of day we measure it, what time of the year, where we are on earth, what is in between us and the two stars, what position the stars are in their orbit. Like these characteristics have nothing to do with the star itself but can still be measurable characteristics that can correlate with the brightness we observe, making D (which says they needs to come from the stars) not necessary?

1/5 on hardest got me bagged

#feedback I feel like it would be nice if this section had a written review lesson that listed all the different flaws we encountered. This would help solidify all the variations we were exposed to without having to go back to each lesson and see what new flaw was introduced.

I have been thinking about these questions as RRE questions and it has been helpful. For example, D explains why the conclusion is wrong (which we know from it being a flaw question) which becomes the right answer. I don't know how reliable it is but I have used it a few times throughout this section and it has been beneficial.

Could it also be considered context/fact? If the question had an answer choice stating it was a fact I would have had a hard time deciding if it was a premise or a fact and I was wondering if anyone had any insights into how to tell the difference.

I chose C as well. I don't understand how D is correct but after reviewing it, I can see why C is wrong. I think it is because C is saying what Engle is thinking and why they can't draw this conclusion prematurely (in other words it relies on him making this presumption about McKinley) but the question is asking us to take the analysis one step further and to see what Engle thinks about what McKinley's statements. Meaning how would he get to this conclusion. Again I don't understand why D is correct but I hope that clears up why you can eliminate C (because although it is what Engle needs to think in order to make his statements, its not what he thinks McKinley is saying, rather something he needs to think on his own in order to come to his conclusion).

I picked E because if the cost of the tuition has been going up over the last few years AND the applicant pool has gone down then how could the argument ever make any sense. I also thought A wasn't necessary because anyone making any argument can always be wrong, it's not like the president had to be correct. SMH

This is exactly what I thought and why I went with E.

Just to add on after rereading, I eliminated B,C,E because they fit the exception and therefore the rule is silent and we cannot make any conclusions about aliens that are as intelligent as we are.

Same but I ended up getting this right using a different method than he does. I used the rule exception theory to negate the 'unless' in the conclusion and then it became a whole lot clearer. It looked something like this....

Exception: At least same level of intelligence

p1: cannot send spacecraft

p2: communicate -> same level of intelligence

-----------

c: cannot determine soon

This allowed me to eliminate B, C, and E. Then all I needed to do was evaluate A/D and D was clearly better than A. I hope this helps! (Remember we don't always need to negate sufficient in logic, we can use exceptions!)

I thought answer choice A was correct because in the RRE lessons sections you said it wasn't valid to assume that the people were negligent or wouldn't "take the path of least resistance" when explaining why certain answers were incorrect. Here they are looking for an incorrect answer so wouldn't the reverse be true? I.E. since its a wrong way to explain the phenomenon in other questions, wouldn't it be wrong here as well (which would actually be the right answer because its an except question)?