"Some" Answer Choices for Strengthening, Weakening, and SA Questions

DaBears85

So I just finished reading the Loophole in LR by Ellen Cassidy (great book for anyone no matter where you are currently in your prep) and I thought it was necessary to share this topic covered in the book with y'all. I have been studying for a little over a year now and I never noticed this concept, but now that I do I can already tell it will make a drastic improvement on my LR score.

So in the book she basically talks about strengthening, weakening, and SA (to name a few) as powerful questions that need powerful answer choices. That being said, think about how weak and also often tempting answer choices that begin with "some", "several", "many", etc. are.

I'll give an example of the point I'm trying to make. Look up question twelve, section one on prep test 45. I still think this question is very difficult, but look at the most popular wrong AC, AC D, that 4% less people picked than the correct one. "Some of the fish." In this stimulus we were never given how many fish were affected so for all we know it could be 100k fish. Some of the fish could be 1 fish. Does that weaken the argument in any way if there were in fact 100k fish in the sample size? Hell no! You could look at those first four words of the AC and with a decent level of confidence eliminate that AC saving you a lot of time trying to parse out what it means, how it is connected to the stimulus, and if it even weakens the stimulus.

So in conclusion, be very wary when you have a "powerful" question and an AC has a word that makes it weak. Most of the time it probably does very little to the argument if anything at all. I'm not saying to eliminate it based on that fact alone, but definitely be cautious of this.

Hope this helped some of y'all who never noticed this either.

Jay Hawlader

nice, thank you