Question About Sufficient Assumption

CalPoliSci

When you see a conditional statement in either the stimulus or the answer choice, do you always translate to the contrapositive to check if it matches your pre-phrase? I noticed that I almost never translate to the contrapositive, and that may be why I get hard sufficient assumption questions wrong. It seems like you HAVE to translate to the contrapositive because that's how the test designers make it more difficult.

A good example is PT73, S2, Q12. The correct answer as well as the most tempting have to be translated to the contrapositive to fill the gap, and the translation also gets at the nuance in their differences.

What does everyone think?

Accounts Playable

Strictly speaking, the distinction between a conditional statement and its contrapositive is arbitrary. Both mean the same thing, and determining which one is the "original" statement and which one is the "contrapositive" has a lot to do with the preferences of the reader.

There is actually some pretty decent psychology research (Logic Made Easy by Deborah Bennett talks about this; I don't really recommend the book as a whole, though) done about hiding statements in the contrapositive (especially if the contrapositive has a lot of "nots" in it). Having a lot of negations tends to confuse people, and it's a pretty simple way to add difficulty to a question.

For practical purposes, if you need to think about both translations to get the question correct in a time efficient manner, then do that. A lot of the time, diagramming out a really hard sufficient assumption question really is necessary.

CalPoliSci

@"Accounts Playable" That makes sense. Of course on easier SA questions where the gap and the answer choice is obvious, I won't translate to the contrapositive. But now I realize that when I'm in a difficult SA question, translating difficult answer choices will be another useful tool in my toolkit, along with diagramming.

BinghamtonDave

As an aside: the question you referenced, I think 9/10 times I would have gone with (D)...

CalPoliSci

@David3389 Yeah that's the answer I went with too. But when you apply what I said about contrapositives, the actual answer sounds so much better. During my timed session, I had such a hard time distinguishing between D and the correct answer.