Need help with NA questions

Cass Stratton

Im trying to do these questions and they make zero sense to me, I cannot wrap my head around how you go about solving them. Ive also been doing the core curriculum with the explanation videos and I still can not comprehend, when explained the right answer choice makes sense but it does not make sense when I go to do it by myself.

Matt Sorr

Typically, I try to tackle all LR problems intuitively before trying more formulaic approaches. So for NA questions, I first ask myself: "Which one of these answer choices absolutely HAS to be true for this person's argument to remain standing?" Often, and particularly for the easier NA questions, the answer will stick out to me when I focus on that. For instance, if I make the argument that the mayor should walk in the Christmas parade next weekend because the mayor is an important symbol in the community, my argument is based on a bunch of necessary assumptions. One of these assumptions is that the mayor is alive. Another is that the mayor is capable of walking. Both of those assumptions HAVE to be true for my argument to even be possible. So if I see one of these in the ACs, I go with it and keep moving through the section.

If I can't figure out the answer choice intuitively, I go through each answer choice and try to think about what happens if the answer choice is denied. So, using the same example from above, if the question asks "Which one of the following assumptions does the argument depend on?" (or any of the question stems for necessary assumption questions), and answer choice A says, "The mayor will be alive during the time of the parade," I think to myself," Well, what would happen if this answer choice wasn't true?" So, to make answer choice A "not true," we'd say "The mayor will NOT be alive during the time of the parade." This usually helps the answer stick out to me more, as I'll realize," Hey, answer choice A absolutely has to be correct because if we deny it the whole argument totally collapses. How could the mayor walk in the parade if the mayor isn't alive?"

I find that for the more difficult NA questions, I'm typically tripped up because I falsely believe something has to be true when it doesn't actually have to be true. So keeping with the example I've been using, some answer choice might say something like "The mayor will be in town for the entirety of the parade." Perhaps I'll take the more methodical approach of denying the answer choice to see how it affects the argument, in which case the denied statement is, "The mayor will NOT be intown for the entirety of the parade." Particularly under timed pressure, I'm liable to erroneously think something like: "Oh, yeah, well of course that has to be true, because how could the mayor walk in the parade if the mayor isn't in town?" In reality, this doesn't have to be true at all. The AC isn't saying the mayor won't be in town for any of the parade, it's saying the mayor won't be in town for every last second of the parade. It's still totally possible the mayor could walk in the parade if this is true. The mayor could simply walk for the first half of the parade then leave early. Or the mayor could walk at the front of the parade, finish before most of the parade, and leave before the parade finishes. Since we can deny the answer choice and the argument can still be perfectly fine, it's not a necessary assumption. So under time pressure I really have to force myself to consider situations where an answer choice could be denied and the argument could still stand.

Apologies for the long winded response but I hope this helps a bit!