hi! i've been doing lots of practice since this question lol and i think i understand it better. for SA, you want something strong that proves our conclusion. the goal is to trigger something to give us the conclusion we want. the "solely" thing is annoying, since in other questions we may want to stay away from language like that, but it works for SA. if we hold answer choice A to be true, then yes we trigger the conditions for the conclusion in the stimulus to be met! it makes sense for us the have the conclusion that we have in the stimulus.

in ellen cassidy's Loophole, she talks about powerful vs provable questions. strengthen, weaken, and SA are question types were powerful answers are good since they help us reach (or not reach, if it's weaken) a type of conclusion. i hope this is helpful!!!!!!!

the courts haven't been overly conservative per se; we only get one instance of that in the passage. the passage implies that the issue at hand is how the language in the reforms is kind of vague and so the burden is on the lower courts to determine how to apply it. in the 1984 case, yes it was more conservative. but that doesn't mean all of the issues are rooted in conservative applications; that is just a symptom of this overall issue. the problem is that we are not getting the rulings we would hope for bc the lower courts are interpreting the reforms differently. i hope that makes sense!!

hi! i think the contrapositive would be that /at least intelligent → /determine (so in other words if the aliens are dumb then we won't be able to determine). you are right that the negated part becomes the sufficient for "unless" but then when you do the contrapositive "being able to determine" becomes "not being able to determine". i hope that this was able to help a little!

i think it's bc the stimulus says "when" none of the fully qualified candidates already work at arvue so that means we want the whole pool of candidates to def not be working for arvue already. B kind of implies that there are candidates that may already work for arvue; if "of all the candidates" we are talking about the ones who don't work for arvue, it feels like the implication is that there are indeed candidates that do work for arvue rn. E gives a rule that's more iron clad. that's how i thought of it!!

i eliminated A bc of "solely" since i thought that that might be too strong; my train of thought was focused on how we would even know if this was the sole motivation? does the emphasis on the primary motivation not really matter here since the stim says that ultimately checkers acted this way bc their goal was to hurt and we don't really care about other motives? i might be overthinking this but if someone could clarify that would be so great!

i kind of thought through this by thinking about the premise-conclusion relationship as "it can't be the worms and it had to be the geological processes bc the worms allegedly did not exist during this time." answer d tells us that it cannot be the geological processes; it is just not possible. this knocks our conclusion out of the park. it also kind of relates to the classic flaw where a lack of proof is taken as a proof that something doesn't exist; just bc there is no evidence regarding the worms right now, does not mean the worms didn't exist. the worms could've existed and made those tracks and there's a chance we just don't have proof! i hope this helps a bit!!!

usually the premises are the things that we assume are going to be true; it's the relationship between the premises and the conclusion that we actually want to strengthen or weaken (at least usually). there's always going to be some issue between the premises and the conclusion and strengthen/weaken questions either help that gap or expose it even further, respectively. i hope this was kinda helpful!

hi!!! we need the answer choice that is required for this logical relationship to work. we have to assume he did not show her everything. if he didn't show her everything then perhaps he showed her one thing or two things or a few things or most things or everything except for one thing. the extent to which james did not show the chair the proposals is not that relevant except when understanding he did not show everything he was supposed to. so yeah it could be either, but i don't think it necessarily impacts the relationship. you could also think of it conditionally:

chair endorses proposal → james includes everything

since it was misleading for james to claim the proposal was endorsed, that means the chair didn't truly endorse, which is the contrapositive of the above. if james does NOT include everything then the chair does NOT approve. the contrapositive of all is not none! it's just "not all" aka some. i hope this helps!!

hi! we flip "and" to "or" (and vice versa) bc if a conditional required 2 things to happen, then the situation that is occurring will not occur if only one of the conditions are satisfied.

imagine this scenario: "if i go on a walk, i will wear sunscreen and a hat"

walk → sunscreen AND hat

contrapositive: /sunscreen OR /hat →/walk

if i'm walking, i will certainly need my sunscreen and my hat; i need both of these for my walk. what if i only have a hat but no sunscreen? i can't walk! what if i only have sunscreen but no hat? i still can't walk!

we change the "and" to "or" since losing even one of these things would make it so that the conditional does not work out.

i was super confused too in the beginning so i hope this helps. there's a khan academy article that also really explains it well.