Need help identifying irrelevant content in SA/PSA questions

joshmcneillwebb

I've been working through the late 40s and early 50s preptests and I'm consistently missing sufficient (and pseudo-sufficient) assumption questions because the stimulus includes irrelevant content which appears to be a premise but is really there to distract.

Do you have any advice on how to spot irrelevant content in these sorts of questions? Two examples of what I'm talking about are PT52S1Q17 and J27S3Q24.

taschasp

For PT52S1Q17, before looking at the ACs, there's actually nothing in the stimulus that's irrelevant to the argument. It seems like the argument is saying that if you make decisions after cautiously waying evidence -- aka if you are prudent -- then you will be resented. And then it says that people want to be "instantly and intuitively liked", and from that it concludes that you shouldn't be prudent. If we assume that being resented implies not being instantly and intuitively liked, we could draw out the argument like this:

Prudent -> Resented
Resented -> /IILiked
People Want -> IILiked

---

Prudent -> Imprudent

In other words, linking the premises together, we have:

A -> B -> /C -> /D

---

A -> X

Most often, the answer will be /D -> X or /X -> D. This time, they went with B -> X. They just jumped over the first sentence and linked being resented directly to imprudence.

Sometimes, sufficient assumptions will do that, because it's logically valid, even though it makes part of the argument structure completely irrelevant. But there's no way to predict it. Just try to understand the entire argument and find the answer choice that makes it valid -- or, just as much, knock out the other four that don't!