Self-study
Last year a local advertising agency produced many of its television commercials in a studio with improperly installed equipment. ██ █ ███████ ███ █████ ██ █████ ███████████ ███ ███ █████████ ████████████ ████ ███ ████████ ████ ███ ████████████ ██████████ ████ ██████ ████ █████ ████████ ███ ██ ████ ████████ ██████████ ████ ████ ████████ ████████ █████ ██████████ ███████████ ████ ██████ ██ ██████████ ███████████ ████ ████ ██████ ██████ ██ ████ ███████ █████ █████████ ██████ ████ ██████ ████ ███ █████ ███████████ █████ ██████████ ███████████ ████ █████ ████████ ████████
Objective: Resolve, Reconcile, and Explain Questions
The stimulus in a Resolve, Reconcile, and Explain question will present a curious fact pattern (note: NOT an argument with premises and a conclusion!), then ask us to provide a potential explanation for the odd set of circumstances they describe. These questions have the exact same structure as riddles: This fact is true, this other fact is true, and yet this other fact is also true! How could this be?!?
So we’ll approach the stimulus as though we’re reading a riddle – we’re not allowed to doubt any of the individual claims, but we should be on the lookout for subtle conceptual shifts or assumptions lurking in the connections between them.
After reading the stimulus in this way, you’ll find yourself somewhere on the psychological spectrum between “I have no idea how this could be / These facts all seem normal and consistent to me.” and “I can tell you the exact explanation right now.” More likely than either extreme, you may find yourself thinking “I can’t name the exact explanation right now, but could figure out a few with some time to noodle.”
Depending on where you find yourself, you’ll either go into hunt mode (looking for the exact explanation you anticipated) or process of elimination mode (reading each answer choice and asking “would this explain things?”. Both are fine! Your process of elimination will still go a bit smoother, though, if you spend a bit of time noodling first. It’ll help you recognize a good explanation when you see it.
Riddle Summary
A local ad agency had a glitch that resulted in noticeable audio lag in their commercials, especially when people were talking. And yet, the car companies working with the agency had better results than car companies working with different agencies!
The odd part distilled: Technical errors resulting in uncanny, unsynced audio seem…bad. So why did the agency’s car companies do so much better than their competitors?
Potential Anticipations
The phenomenon presented here is open to several explanations that it would be reasonable to anticipate. In an easy question, the right answer choice would match one of these, and the wrong answer choices would suggest other stuff entirely.
In this question, though, a number of the wrong answer choices point directly to these reasonable anticipations. Rather than acting like those avenues of anticipation are obviously misguided somehow, we’ll analyze them here:
You may have noticed the gap betweenmany commercials being affected by the audio glitch and the counterintuitively-good performance of the auto dealerships working with the agency. Perhaps none (or very few) of the auto dealers were affected by the glitch.
Or perhaps you picked up on a potential difference between the ads most affected by the audio glitch and automobile ads in general. The stimulus itself gives us a push in this direction: what if automobile ads involve a lot less talking?
In hindsight, as you’ll see in the explanations for (A) and (D), these avenues of anticipation share a common limitation. On their own, they explain how auto dealers working with this agency could have dodged the bullet – they explain why the potentially ruinous consequences of this audio glitch wouldn’t apply to them. They do not, however, explain why the agency’s auto dealers performed better than their competitors.
For that, we’d need to supply the additional information that this ad agency outperforms its competitors in other respects (like maybe the cinematography or writing is better). So these anticipations aren’t wrong – again, they’re quite promising – they just require an answer choice that also supplies that additional information.
A separate avenue of anticipated explanations comes from asking the clean question, “How could a noticeable audio glitch in a commercial result in better sales?” If you’ve ever had an annoying commercial jingle burned into your brain without your consent, you might have the answer near at hand:
Random noticeable nonsense in commercials, good or bad, makes them more memorable.
I personally did not anticipate this – I had to figure it out during process of elimination – but it’s pretty reasonable in hindsight. I bet a lot of you did.
7.
Which one of the following, ██ █████ ████ █████ ██ ███████ ███ █████ ███████████ █████████ ██████
a
Most viewers turned ███ ███ █████ ██ █████ ███████████ ████ █████ █████████████████████ ███████████ █████ ██████ ████ ███████
This matches one of the aforementioned reasonably-anticipated explanations: perhaps there’s something about car commercials that makes them less impacted by the audio glitch. Specifically, (A) suggests that maybe people turn the sound off when watching car commercials, which would make the audio glitch unnoticeable.
That is very tempting! So tempting, in fact, that it took us a while to work out the clean reason (A) is wrong, and that deep analysis is what gave rise to the “In hindsight” section of our Potential Anticipations.
But the limitations we refer to in that section apply here: (A) explains how the dealers working with our ad agency could have dodged the bullet presented by the audio glitch, but that explanation on its own only gives us a scenario in which the ad agencies are all on even footing. We need to explain why our dealers performed better than their competitors.
If (A) included additional information along the lines of “during this period, all the competing ad agencies had a bug that resulted in their ads only showing static,” we’d be cooking.
Incidentally, this fits the “partial explanation” archetype of wrong answers.
b
People are more ██████ ██ ██████ █ ██████████ ██████████ ████ ████ ████ ██ ███ █████ ███ ████████ ████ ███ ████████ █████████████
(B) answers the clean question, “How could a noticeable audio glitch in a commercial result in better sales?” As mentioned in our Potential Anticipations, it suggests that random noticeable nonsense in commercials makes them more memorable.
Granted, (B) absolutely does require the assumption that “recall” can be good for sales, even when that recall is tied to something infuriating. We’re not in a Must Be True or Most Strongly Supported question, though – the answer choices in RRE questions (and Strengthen, Weaken, and Evaluate questions) are allowed to require reasonable, common sense assumptions. In fact, comparing the reasonableness of assumptions is common when choosing among tempting answers in these questions.
And (B)’s assumption is reasonable – plenty of commercials in the real world are intentionally annoying or infuriating for the sake of being memorable.
c
Most of the ███████████ ████ ██████ ██ ███████████ ████████ ██ ███ ██████ ████ ██████████ █████████ █████████ ████ ██████████ ████████████
(C) points to a gap in the facts that you may have anticipated – there is a potential difference between the affected ads and the auto ads. “
But (C) fits one of the common patterns in RRE wrong answer choices: it deepens the phenomenon by telling us that tons of these auto dealers were affected by the audio glitch! So far from explaining how they performed better, (C) presents the riddle in a sharper light, heightening the need for explanation.
d
Not all of ███ ███████████ ████████ ███ ██████████ ███████████ ██ ████ ██████ █████████ █████ ██ ██████ ████████
Like (A), (D) matches one of the aforementioned reasonably-anticipated explanations: perhaps there’s something about car commercials that makes them less impacted by the audio glitch. And (D) matches the stimulus’ clue, too: maybe the car commercials that did so well feature very little talking, so the audio glitch was much less noticeable.
(D) is wrong for the same reasons as (A) – even at its best, it would only explain how our auto dealers dodged the bullet of this audio glitch, not why their ads performed better than their competitors.
But (D)’s weak language (“not all are” = “some aren’t”) is also a strike against it. Learning that a couple auto ads were in the “less affected by the bug” category helps our explanation a lot less than it would to learn all auto ads were unaffected.
e
Most of the █████ ██████████ ███████████ ██████ ████ ████ ███ ███ ████ ███████ ██ ██████████ ████████████
The phenomenon we’re explaining is the difference in sales between two groups, both of whom relied on TV commercials. Information about auto dealers who did not rely on TV commercials has no bearing on that comparison.
Imagine we’re explaining how my Squirtle could be a more powerful Pokemon card than your Charizard. (E) says “What if I told you most people don’t play Pokemon?”