Logical reasoning PrepTest 115 · Section 2 · Question 24

Incorrect. Concentrating hard enough to lose yourself-some-not Pleasure from curiosity. For this answer to be correct, either of the terms would need to guarantee the negation of the other, thus guaranteeing that there couldn't be even some overlap. However, concentrating that hard is a necessary condition of the contrapositive chain, so it doesn't guarantee anything, and thus this answer is possible.

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Facts

Question Type:
Cannot Be True

Stimulus Summary:
Good students → Learn more than they're taught
Learn more than taught → Derive pleasure from satisfying curiosity
not Concentrate on topic so much you lose yourself → not Derive pleasure from satisfying curiosity

Answer Anticipation:
Cannot Be True questions frequently feature conditional logic as it sets up a common type of correct answer—one that establishes a sufficient condition is present without the necessary condition. Since there are multiple conditionals here that chain together, we should combine them, contrapose the chain, and then find an answer that falls into that pattern.

First, however, a quick note on diagramming the statements. The first one brings up what all good students do (the "all" being implied by the lack of a quantifier but the certainty of the statement). The second is fairly straightforward, using "requires" to highlight a necessary condition. The last statement could be diagrammed multiple ways, but we treated "unless" as "if not" to end up with the statement in our Summary. If you used another method, you likely ended up with the contrapositive, which actually makes your life easier since we'll need to take the contrapositive to get it to chain with the other statements!
Derive pleasure from satisfying curiosity → Concentrate on topic so much you lose yourself

Chaining them together (and streamlining, and also taking the contrapositive), we get:
Good student → Learn more than taught → Pleasure from curiosity → Concentrating hard enough to lose yourself

not Concentrating hard enough to lose yourself → not Pleasure from curiosity → not Learn more than taught → not Good student

Again, we're looking for an answer that brings up a sufficient condition but then states the necessary condition isn't present.

Answer Explanation:
Good student-most-not Pleasure from curiosity. The chain tells us that good students learn more than they're taught, which requires deriving pleasure from satisfying curiosity. As such, all good students derive such pleasure, and it cannot be true that most don't, as this answer states. It is therefore the correct answer.

Key Takeaway:
Knowing how conditional statements work with Cannot Be True questions (and Must Be True questions, as well) can make analysis of answer choices fly by. A lot of the time, the first half of the answer sets it up so the answer can't possibly be correct, and knocking 2-3 seconds off of each answer choice for the 4 or 5 questions that fall into this category in a section frees up a minute for you to pick up a point elsewhere! Since conditional logic can be memorized and drilled, it's well worth the time investment.

Incorrect. Pleasure from curiosity-some-not Good student. Similar to (A), we'd need either of the terms here to guarantee the other is absent for this to be correct. Since not Good student is the necessary condition of the contraposed chain, it guarantees nothing, and thus this answer could be true.

Incorrect. not Good student-some-. . . We just finished ruling out (C) because not being a good student is a necessary condition for the entire chain and thus doesn't guarantee anything, and we can eliminate this answer for the same reason without even reading further.

Incorrect. Concentrating hard enough to lose yourself-most-. . . Similar to (C) and (D), concentrating that hard is a necessary condition of a chain, and thus it doesn't guarantee anything—so whatever shows up at the end of this answer is possible, and we can therefore rule it out.