PT134.S2.Q17 > Question

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It is imprudent to appear prudent, because appearing prudent causes resentment.

It’s difficult to spot the gap here, because the author has given us a specific manifestation of prudency (”forming opinions of others only after cautiously...”) without actually naming this as an example as prudency. When treated as an example of prudency, the gap becomes more clear:

If appearing prudent causes resentment, and we need to conclude that appearing prudent is imprudent, this is a common argument structure: A → B, therefore A → C. So, the assumption we need is B → C. We need to know that causing resentment is imprudent.

(A) can either support a conclusion that a person/group of people is well liked or, as a contrapositive, that someone/a group of people does not act spontaneously. Neither are the conclusion we need. We are trying to support the conclusion that appearing prudent is imprudent.

(B) would weaken our argument. The contrapositive of (B) is “If you don’t act instantly and intuitively, then you are not imprudent.” Using this conditional, the people cautiously forming opinions (appearing prudent) are not acting instantly and intuitively, and so would not be imprudent.

There is no comparison of prudency. We don’t know that anyone believes these prudent-seeming people to be more or less prudent than themselves. And besides, we already know that appearing prudent causes resentment.

We are trying to support the conclusion that appearing prudent is imprudent. Having more information about the inner workings of someone who perhaps acts intuitively/instantly (but perhaps not—(D) didn’t actually say that these people act in this way) does not help us support that conclusion.

This allows the conclusion to be validly drawn. If (E) is true, we can use transitive property from appearing prudent to causing resentment, and then from causing resentment to being imprudent, so that we can validly conclude that appearing prudent is imprudent.

PrepTest 134 - Section 2 - Question 17

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