Self-study
In the Centerville Botanical Gardens, all tulip trees are older than any maples. █ █████████ ███ ███ ████ ██ ███ ██████████ █████████ ███ █████ ████ ███ ██ ███ ███████ ███ ███ ██████████ ██████ ███ █████ ████ ███ ██ ███ █████████
Stimulus Breakdown
The stimulus gives us a set of rules or relationships about the ages of different types of trees in the Centerville Botanical Gardens. First, we are told that "all tulip trees are older than any maples." Then, we're told that most (but not all) sycamore trees are older than any of the maples. Finally, we're told that all the maples in the gardens are older than all the dogwoods.
Notice that there's no conclusion in this stimulus. We're just given these relationships and will have to make inferences based on them.
Potential Inferences
You might be tempted to try to diagram this stimulus with conditional logic, especially since there are plenty of conditional indicators ("all," "any," etc.) here. But if you try mapping this, you'll run into complications: do you say "tulip → older than maple," or "maple → younger than tulip"? Notice that the answer choices aren't limited to "older than" relationships — they ask about some things being as old as, or not as old as, some other things.
So trying to draw this all out with conditional logic would probably be more confusing than helpful. Sometimes it's more useful to draw out inferences just by thinking in English. Let's do this sentence by sentence.
The first sentence tells us that all tulip trees are older than all maples in the garden. This means that no tulip trees and maples are the same age: all the maples are younger than all the tulip trees.
The second sentence tells us that most, but not all, of the sycamore trees are older than any of the maples. So we know that most sycamore trees, like all tulip trees, are older than all the maples, though we don't know anything about how these sycamores and the tulip trees compare to each other in age. We also know that some sycamore trees must be as old as, or younger than, at least some maples — which lets us infer that those sycamore trees must be younger than any of the tulip trees, since all maples are younger than all tulip trees.
The third sentence says that all the maples are older than any of the dogwoods. This lets us infer that all the tulip trees and most of the sycamore trees are also older than all dogwoods, since they are older than all maples. As for the "some" sycamore trees that are the same age or younger than some maples, we don't know enough to say how they compare in age to the dogwoods.
So we've drawn two inferences from this stimulus: some sycamores are younger than all tulip trees, and all tulip trees and most sycamores are older than all dogwoods. We can keep those inferences in mind as we go through the answer choices.
7S
Analysis by 7Sage
12.
If the statements above are █████ █████ ███ ██ ███ █████████ ████ ████ ██ ████ ██ █████ ██ ███ ███████████ █████████ ████████
a
Some dogwoods are ██ ███ ██ ███ ████████ █████ ██████
b
Some dogwoods are ██ ███ ██ ███ ████████ ██████████
c
Some sycamores are ███ ██ ███ ██ ███ ██████ █████████
d
Some tulip trees ███ ███ ██ ███ ██ ███ ██████ ██████████
e
Some sycamores are ███ ██ ███ ██ ███ ████████ █████ ██████