Logical Reasoning

emilycyoung1

Can anybody tell me what logical reasoning questions that you must be wary of extreme language (only, whenever, all, etc) when approaching? I know inference questions ("the information above provides the most support for which one of the following") but what other questions is it important to be wary of extreme language and keep it vague? Also just on a side note, why is it important to be wary of extreme language on inference questions? I have ever come across an all encompassing answer for this.

Cant Get Right

This is a trap they can set on a lot of different questions. I’m not sure how it’d come up in a RRE question, but I can’t really think of anything else where it would be at all difficult to set an extreme language trap. The fundamental flaw with extreme language is ultimately that it’s changing the terms of the argument. If the argument is A —> B, obviously we can’t conclude A therefore C. This is really obvious, but this is essentially all that is happening. What makes it such an effective trap is that B and C may be very closely related, and often very naturally linked in our minds. So if an argument is about Google, for example, a really tricky answer choice (and this would definitely work for an inference question) might say something about search engines. But that’s too extreme. I dunno, I guess there’s askjeeves.com or something, lol. Sometimes extreme language is a little easier to pick up on because of universal or existential quantifiers; some search engines VS all search engines, that kind of thing. It’s a little more conspicuous, but it’s still throwing around a lot of the terms we’re anticipating to be in our correct answer choice; so they’re still dangerous.

stepharizona

@"Cant Get Right" does a great job, short answer

All of them!!!

Sometimes people dismiss extreme language automatically and that can be a mistake. Writers know this.