Logical reasoning PrepTest 109 · Section 4 · Question 25

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Facts

Question Type:
Must Be True

Stimulus Summary:
Contract negotiator → Been lied to
Tell a lie → Practicing deception
Been lied to → Has told a lie

Answer Anticipation:
This stimulus features three conditional statements that, tenses aside, can be chained together.

The first clause uses "every" to introduce a sufficient assumption; the second uses "whoever" for the same purpose. Any word that establishes 100% of a group has a characteristic can be diagrammed using conditional logic.

It's also important to note the shift between the first and second clause—the first is about being lied to, the second is about telling a lie. Be sure you noted that!

Finally, the third statement uses "anyone" as a sufficient condition indicator.

If we ignore the tenses (which don't matter here—someone who has told a lie was practicing deception at the time), we can chain these together and take the contrapositive:
Contract negotiator → Been lied to → Told a lie → Practiced deception
not Practiced deception → not Told a lie → not Been lied to → not Contract negotiator

Let's find an answer that lines up with these chains, either in their entirety or a portion of them.

Answer Explanation:
Contract negotiator → Practiced deception. This represents the inference made from the entire conditional chain, so it's the correct answer.

Key Takeaway:
Practice those conditional skills! There's no better feeling than getting to the last page of an LR section feeling as if you don't have enough time to get to both questions, and then knocking the first one out in under a minute because you're rock solid on conditional logic.

Incorrect. Practice deception-some-not Told a lie. First, this answer is a some statement because "not everyone does" is the same as saying "some don't." With that noted, this answer could be true since Practice deception isn't sufficient for anything, but it's not definitively supported by the conditionals.

Incorrect. Told a lie-some-not Practicing deception. The second conditional guarantees that everyone who tells a lie is practicing deception, so this answer is contradicted by the stimulus.

Incorrect. This answer ties the lies to a contract negotiator, but they're relevant only to the first conditional, not the others.

Incorrect. Told a lie → Been lied to. This answer is a reversal of the last conditional in the stimulus.