Hi thanks in advance if anyone can help. How should I deal with conditional answer choices in strengthen and weaken questions. Does it matter if the sufficient condition is triggered in the stimulus or does it not matter? Sometimes I have trouble with these answer choices because I'm hesitant to choose them since the stimulus doesn't indicate that the sufficient condition has been met even though the necessary condition will either weaken or strengthen the argument depending on the question stem.
Comments
Ok, so for #13, like most weaken/strengthen questions, I want to break down the stimulus and find the flaw/gap. Finding the flaw first makes this such an easier process.
Conclusion: Each academic discipline subscription decisions should be determined solely by a journal’s usefulness in that discipline, and that usefulness is measured by the number of times that journal is cited in other journals.
Premise: Soaring prices of of journals have forced libraries to reduce their number of subscriptions.
Flaw: It’s a weird stimulus because the gap is self-contained in the conclusion. What jumps out at me is the arbitrariness of equating usefulness with the frequency with which a journal is cited. Is that the only useful way to determine a journals usefulness? So I want to look for an answer that takes advantage of that flaw. In other words, we’re looking for an answer that explains how the number of times a journal is cited is not a useful way of deciding which subscription to keep.
Elimination: (A) the nonacademic readership plays no part in this argument's flaw. (B)average length of journal article also plays no part in the argument’s flaw. (C) the genral public access to the journals plays no part in the argument’s flaw. (D) looks good. (E) these controversies are irrelevant unless they play a part in the citation process. But since the answer doesn’t say, we can eliminate.
Selection: (D) This is the only one that addresses the gap that we pre-phrased. If that statement is true, then the number of citations is called into question as being useful. (D) is the correct answer.
Probably more than what you wanted but I wanted to be thorough. I can get to the other question later, but I think I’ve answered your essential question: there’s no need to “trigger” the conditional somewhere in the stimulus for a conditional statement to Weaken/Strengthen or strengthen the argument.
As for "focusing on the necessary," I think you have to take the statement as a whole. Obviously in this example, the necessary condition is what does the most damage, but I'm sure there are other examples where the crux of the weakening portion is in the sufficient condition.
I suppose if the sufficient condition were to contradict something in the stimulus, then you could eliminate that answer (because it would render that statement irrelevant..thank you Logic Games). But I don't think focusing on one side of a conditional statement over another is a great idea for these kind of questions.
The key to doing well on Weaken and Strengthen questions is to stay flexible. Because they often deal with flaws that the argument fails to consider, the correct answer could seem to come out of left field.
Hope this clarifies.