Interested!

Q21: I struggled on this one, choosing E during timed and switching to A during BR. But understanding this really elucidated it for me:

If we chose A, it would read "...correcting a misconception about a glorious past in order to overturn degrading representation". But African American historians weren't trying to correct a misconception. They weren't trying to argue that their ancestors didn't come over on slave ships or work on plantations. These were not misconceptions about a glorious past, they are true facts. Instead, they are trying to shape the conception of why, in spite of those facts, they have a right to citizenship and belong in America. They are trying to shape a conception about that glorious past, thereby overturning the degrading representations of blackness.

I chose D at first but I wanted to see if anybody else had this rationale for disproving it.

It was at first very attractive to me because I applied the general statement, that humans and animals could not be impacted by diseases even though they are carriers, to the population of animals referred to in the stimulus. But then after understanding that C is a much more appropriate AC, I went back to disprove D. It seems like D could possibly be too generic? There could be animals in different areas that are resistant and not impacted by the diseases carried, but we have nothing to assert that D applies to the specific native-North American animals referred to in the stimulus, right? I have been staring that the stimulus for a while so I might be completely off.

After skipping this one in round one, I think I got a little frantic in round 2 and chose an AC hastily. I chose C because I thought it was the most descriptively accurate, but that was because I interpreted the AC with the question in mind, rather than take the AC at face value. I read the AC as "Just because they established a cause means that x event must have occurred", rather than "confused the cause with the fact that the event occurred", which makes much less sense. I also went through this question in 47 seconds, so it is likely that I didn't even read E.

I think where I can start in improving on questions like these is anticipating the flaw, which might have given me more confidence going into the answers, but also ensure I am understanding how the AC applies to the question, especially for flaw questions.

It took reading through the comments to understand, but I finally got the reason why B is different from A. Bernard is objecting the the REASON why the standard keyboard was inherited from the typewriter, not the fact that it was inherited. B only proves that the standard keyboard was inherited, but A provides the REASON that it was inherited even though the technological problems no longer exist.

I was really defending A while I was looking through all the explanations in the comments, but here is my thinking that finally pushed me over to thinking B was correct.

My reasoning for supporting A was because it seems like what draws a distinction between barley and wheat, and therefore why wheat production decreased, was because wheat inherently needed more water than barely, which lead to excessive irrigation and lack of drainage. If barley doesn't need as much water, then doesn't that mean you wouldn't have excessive irrigation?

But the issue here is that we cannot assume that the "excessive irrigation" relates at all to cultivating wheat. What if they had tomatoes that they grew right next to the wheat that they thought needed gallons and gallons of water, and that overwatering led to excessive salt in the soil? B is much better at strengthening the argument for the decrease in wheat production without the assumption that wheat is linked to excessive irrigation. I guess the lesson here is do not make assumptions that are outside the scope of the argument, and especially do not pick the AC that relies on that assumption. Hope this helps other people that made the same mistake.

This is one NA in which I think hunting for the AC that bridges the gap is the most effective way of getting through the question quickly. Looking at all the answer choices during the timed portion, I got too caught up in the negations and was not really thinking about the gap in the argument.

All the premises tell us is how society changing impacts the VALUE of elders' advice. But the conclusion talks about how young people DEFER to older members. Value does not always equate with deference. "Deference" seems more like an action than "holding value" in something. We can perceive a situation in which a younger member values an elder's advice, but because they are scared of people judging them for taking the advice, so they defer to some younger, cool member of the group's advice. I think the connection we are looking for is perception vs action. So can we find an answer choice that says the more younger folks value their elders' advice, the more they will show deference to their elders? C works perfectly in this case.

Logic breakdown:

AGR most ED

GR most SBG

/SBG --> SBC

GR --> SBG OR SBC

This is a MBT question, so I would usually run straight to the logic, but the logic does not match up with any of the answer choices. I got stuck because a lot of the AC's are making the jump between GR that is funded by government or corporations to advances in government research. But I guess the assumption we have to make here is that there would be no advances in government research without research.

So I took a step back from the logic and looked at the answer choices, and it seemed D is the best fit. We know that genetic research is either funded by government or corporations. And we know that advances in genetic research cause eithical dilemmas. So without consulting logic, it seems that research related ethical dilemmas would need government or corporation funding, which is what D says. I don't like the other answer choices because they are making assumptions about which of the two sources funds advances in genetic research, and I just don't think we can make that judgment at all from our premises.

This one absolutely sucks, but I am going write out my thinking in the case that it might help others feel a bit better about D.

So the stimulus gives us this: There is a poll conducted with E's and BM's, and the respondents are asked to rate their confidence in their responses. Both groups were overconfident, but E a little bit more so than BM's. Therefore, people that are overconfident are more likely to start a business than those less confident.

When I first looked at it, I got hung up on the idea that the conclusion was getting support from the fact that E's start businesses for a living. So I thought they were making the assumption that just because E's are overconfident and may have experience starting businesses, they are more likely to start businesses. But then I saw a bigger hole in assuming that the confidence in their answers on the surveys transfer over to confidence in starting businesses. So thats why I jumped straight to E, because it seems to patch up that hole. And on quick glance, D seemed too specific because it only mentions BM's. And also why should we care about what they did in the past? However, the important thing that I wish would have caught my eye is the false equivocation of business acumen and willingness to start a business against odds. The former is very broad, business acumen does not need to include willingness to start a business. If it said "confidence in his or her ability to start a business", that would have been much more feasible. So now E has some issues, and we cannot choose it and move on.

So now with D and E both looking not so great, lets look at the passage once more and the big hole we are trying to fix: we are trying to find a link between the overconfidence data in the survey and starting businesses. Upon further examination, D actually does draw a relationship between these two things. E may do so a bit more explicitly, but D highlights a piece of the puzzle that is a bit weaker: the overconfidence of the BM's. BM's are less overconfident than the E's, but the psychologist still reaches the conclusion that overconfident PEOPLE (both BM's and E's) are more likely to start businesses. BM's are less overconfident than E's, so if we can draw a link between them and starting businesses, we can make up much more ground in strengthening the argument. So D does exactly that: overconfident BM's were found to have attempted to start businesses in the past. With this, we can imply that overconfidence does have some substantial link with willingness to start a business.

I chose D along with everybody else, and I think this question is very difficult, making it a pretty mean 3 star. However, I wanted to post here to dive deeper into the two assumptions made in B and D, and see if it helps anybody else reconcile why B is the better answer:

B) The assumption here that got me was that this group of people were the ones that made the advanced weaponry, based off only the evidence that it was buried near them. But if we are taking a step back and looking at the goal of the question, we are only trying to weaken it, not necessarily entirely disprove the conclusion. In that light, even if the chances that the people that the weapons were buried near actually made the weapons is not 100%, it still sufficiently weakens the argument and is worthy of a "tilde" symbol.

D) This assumption was a bit more heinous once I dove a little deeper. The assumption made is that having dexterity is the same as having free use of one's hands. This is absurd. Dexterity requires skill - you must be GOOD at using your hands. Free use of the hands is literally the lowest bar possible. All you need is to ALLOW them to be used - they just have to be free. This is so far away from being dexterous. I could have the least dexterous hands on the entire planet, and they could still be "free".

So when looking at the assumption D makes versus the assumption B makes, it seems a little more reasonable that B is the correct answer. But of course, during my first take and blind review, I did not glance twice at B and thought D looked perfect. I think part of the reason is I knew that hands were integral to the relationship stated, so I was anticipating the correct AC to mention hands. B doesn't explicitly mention hands, whereas D does - so my mind automatically is more comfortable with D.

Interested!

Interested!

None of the answer choices seemed relevant to me because I did not connect taxes with the hiring of staff. I think if I would have made that connection it might have clicked, but also I should have probably eliminated more of the answer choices through POE.

I made the mistake of equating "below average" as "lack of rain". I think I was looking for an answer that had some logical structure, which was much more clear in AC B than AC E. Yet, I have to be more careful when choosing answers on these types of questions, because the details are crucial. If one detail does not match up, I need to move onto the next question and see if there are any other answer choices that are more reasonable.

I took a long time on this one because I really didn't see any good answers on the first few times reading it through. Yet what really helped me is rewording D, as many of the earlier comments had suggested. And moving forward, I think I will always substitute "takes for granted" with "assumes" because for some reason it makes more sense in my head. The other immediate flaw that should have jumped out for me is that in the premise, the author uses the phrase "easy to find", which is not that strong of an existential qualifier, and thus does not represent the entire population of historians. If I would have caught on to that detail, it might have been more clear that "D" was the right answer.

I was conflicted and angry when I first read through the comments/listened to JY's explanation about why AC D was right. I chose C because it specifically mentioned highly polished flints, and D only mentioned general flints. However, I think Accounts Playable made me feel better about the right answer for this one because showing that flints in general were often used for non-aesthetic purposes is stronger than showing that specifically polished ones were used for display in religious ceremonies. In the future I should read each answer choice more closely and not lend bias to the ones the match the stimulus the best, but rather the ones that are the strongest answer to the question.

Well, I got completely tricked by AC D. However, upon further review I could have seen E to be a more attractive answer if I had read more closely because I interpreted "unknown" as too vague to be the negated version of minimal risk. Yet the condition was "known to pose only a minimal risk", which is indeed the opposite of "unknown" and should have triggered the conditional statement to lead me to the conclusion.

I was actually surprisingly close on this one even though I butchered the first translation. By POE, I was able to narrow down my choices to A or B. However, if I had remembered that "cannot" implied negate necessary, then I could have easily eliminated AC B and chosen A, rather than being tricked by B because I didn't have my translations down. I think moving forward I need to remember that MBT relies heavily on the logical translation, so I should not rush it because the small amount of extra time I spend on getting the translation right will make a big difference in how long it takes me to navigate the answer choices.

I fell for the trap in D also. I think I negated "most" to mean "none" in my evaluation and it seemed like a no brainer for me. And with the layer of confusion due to the right vs. left, I completely breezed over B because I thought it was talking about the wrong side of the road. In the future, I need to: (1) remember that the negation of "most" is "some" and (2) remember that in NA questions you are looking for a weak but necessary assumption, and to stray away from AC's like D.

I fell for C because it weakens the evidence/support for the argument. But C isn't relevant enough to the argument given in the stimulus for it to be the correct answer for this question. So what if Klein was too upset to make an accurate identification. This might be the correct answer for a weakening question if the argument was structured differently, but it does not correctly identify the flaw in the argument, which mostly focused on the fact that there was a considerable amount of light.

Chose C on this one because I was moving too quickly and equated "government" with "small elite". I think I was attracted by the conditionality language in C as opposed to B, which seemed like it was wrong when considering conditionality because the order of the premise and conclusion were switched. Moving forward I have to make sure that first, the two items (in this case premise and conclusion) are entirely accurate, and then use conditionality to filter through the answer choices.

I did the same exact thing: chose C on the first go around and then chose A on BR because of the word "enough". I think the main point here is that the other assumptions made in the rest of the answer choices are simply more egregious than the assumption made in E. I did make the mistake of equating "often" with "most", but once I understood that, it was easy upon further review to see that C was the least "bad" in terms of the assumptions made. I struggle with the same thing, focusing on one word in the answer choice and not being able to accept the answer because of that - but I am hoping to correct this moving forward by skipping and coming back to the question with fresh eyes to hopefully have a better gauge of which answer choice is best.