Some art students aren’t taking rhetoric.
Some students take neither rhetoric nor literature.
A
There are students who are taking art but not literature.
B
None of the students taking literature are taking art.
C
There are students who are taking rhetoric but not literature.
D
None of the students taking rhetoric are taking literature.
E
There are students who are taking both art and literature.
This is a very hard question.
Not because of the argument, which is pretty straight forward. Rather, it's because of a very enticing trap wrong answer choice.
This is a Necessary Assumption question. We know this because the question stem states that the right answer choice "must" be assumed. It's needed. It's necessary.
If you don't know the difference between Necessary Assumptions v. Sufficient Assumptions, review that lesson.
The argument is saying that on a talk show, therapy is expected to be entertaining. I'm wondering, okay, it's expected to be entertaining but that doesn't mean the therapist will make it entertaining. Assuming otherwise is just that, an assumption.
We read on to find out that entertaining --almost always--> not high quality help. Now, this is just begging us to make the assumption that high quality help is to be valued over entertainment. And okay, you can assume that if you want. Just be aware you're making that assumption.
Otherwise, the conclusion that follows - therefore therapists shouldn't do therapy on talk shows - will just seem so natural and obvious to you that you're thinking, well okay then, I think this is a fantastic argument. That's not good because you needed to have seen and felt the gap, the assumption made.
Piecing the two premises together, we only get to say that therapists doing therapy on talk shows are expected to do something that's likely going to result in less-than-high-quality-therapy.
So what are the chances that they will provide less-than-high-quality-therapy? Well that depends on the chances that they do what the talk show expects them to do. We can change this number around later, but let's just say they're 70% likely to do what they're expected to do, so they're 70% likely to provide less-than-high-quality-therapy.
Does it follow from that statement that therapists should not do therapy on talk shows?
Only if we draw a bridge between those two statements.
So, hey, look at (C). It draw an awesome bridge. It says that anytime there is even a chance that the therapy might be less than high quality, it should not be provided. Think about what that means. It's setting a very low trigger. What if there is only a 2% chance of us providing less than high quality therapy? (C) would trigger and it would say "Sorry, a chance exists, so no go."
Now, for our case, the chances that on our therapist will provide less-than-high-quality-therapy on the talk show is a whopping 70%. Of course (C), with its low trigger, triggers and helps our argument a lot.
But we call that a sufficient assumption, not a necessary assumption. Remember your first lesson in Necessary Assumptions? You can see this just by tossing (C) out. You can deny that the trigger has to be that low. You can raise the trigger by, say, 10% and it would NOT wreck our argument. In fact, that's still low enough to trigger for our premises.
So you see that (C) really is not necessary.
(E) sets the trigger just right. It increases the trigger from (C) to just around 70%. The trigger condition is set to match the condition laid out in the two premises.
Monique: Art is not simply a passion. The best art critics passionately engage with the artwork, but render their criticism only after shedding all of their biases and consulting general principles of aesthetics.
A
art is not simply a passion
B
good art criticism is sometimes unbiased
C
art critics should not feel emotion toward artworks
D
fairness generally requires minimizing the influence of bias
E
the passionate engagement of the art critic with the artwork is the most important aspect of art criticism
The question stem reads: Which one of the following, if true, most weakens the argument? This is a weaken question.
The author describes two groups of people who have chronic trouble falling asleep. One group relies only on sleeping pills, while another relies only on behavior modification to treat their maladies. The group that relies on behavior modification falls asleep more quickly than the group that relies on sleeping pills. The author concludes from this that behavior modification is more effective than sleeping pills in helping people fall asleep.
The author has made the causal claim: the author argues that behavior modification is causing that group to fall asleep faster than the group who uses sleeping pills. In the curriculum, we covered how the tool science uses to identify causes is the Ideal Experiment. One of the requirements of the Ideal Experiment is that we randomly assign the samples into experimental and control groups. Random assignment of the groups helps isolate the hypothesized cause by controlling for other causes.
The author has provided the hypothesis that behavior modification is causing that group to fall asleep faster than the sleeping pill group. If this were an ideal experiment, we would expect to see a large sample size of people who had chronic trouble falling asleep assigned into a behavior modification group, a sleeping pill group, and a control group. However, what we find in the stimulus is not an experiment with randomly assigned groups. Instead, we find an observation that people who use behavior modification tend to fall asleep faster than those who use sleeping pills. By failing to assign groups randomly, we fail to isolate for other causes, such as self-selection. What does self-selection mean in this case? Let me ask you, “Why might it be that some people use sleeping pills (a medical intervention) and others use behavior modification (a change in habits)?” If you think that people who use sleeping pills might have a more severe case of insomnia than those who use behavior modification, you are spot on. The individuals who have a less severe case of insomnia might have simply self-selected into using behavior modification. The fact they fall asleep quicker might not be caused by their treatment. Instead, they simply have a less severe form of the disease.
Our job is to weaken the argument. So a good answer choice will illustrate the problem we just identified.
Answer Choice (A) is irrelevant to the argument. The argument is about the time it takes to fall asleep, while (A) speaks to the amount of sleep different groups get over the course of a night.
Answer Choice (B) fails to weaken the argument by comparing the behavioral modification group to a newly introduced group: one that has no trouble falling asleep. We can rule this answer choice out because the argument is solely concerned with individuals who need help falling asleep. The conclusion is a comparative claim between behavior modification and sleeping pills, so the comparison between behavior modification and people who do not have trouble falling asleep is irrelevant.
Answer Choice (C) fails to weaken because the argument is already explicitly concerned with the group that uses behavioral modification and does not use sleeping pills. Whether or not people have or have not used sleeping pills in the past is arbitrary.
Correct Answer Choice (D) is exactly what we prephrased. (D) States that the people who are most likely to use sleeping pills are those who have the most trouble falling asleep. So those who use sleeping pills could be falling asleep slower because they initially had much more trouble falling asleep than those who decided to use behavioral modification.
Answer Choice (E) is incorrect. While it does expose a self-selection bias (Those who choose the behavior modification prefer it to medication), it is unclear exactly how that would affect the time it takes to go to sleep. (D) provides a much clearer reason as to why the pill group takes longer.
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