Logical reasoning PrepTest 117 · Section 4 · Question 19

Question prompt

Political scientist: All governments Remaining source text redacted.
Why the credited answer is right

Credited answer: B

The notes below walk through why it fits the stem and how to eliminate the rest.

Argument or Facts

Argument

Valid or Flawed

Flawed

Question Type

Flawed Parallel Reasoning Questions / Sufficient & Necessary Questions

Stimulus Summary

Government worthy of respect → Allow citizens to dissent from policies
Government worthy of respect → ~Leaves minorities unprotected
Therefore - Protect minorities → Allows citizens to criticize policies

Answer Anticipation

This stimulus presents us with a couple conditional statements before reaching a conditional conclusion. Generally, this will involve an illegal reversal or negation.
Before we get to that, however, we need to see if the phrasing of the conclusion is equivalent to the phrasing in the premises here, or if we have any shifts in the concepts discussed. The language used is different, but it may convey the same concepts.
Here, those concepts do match up. Protecting minorities is equivalent to not leaving them unprotected, and allowing dissent necessarily implies allowing criticism. So we don’t have equivocation here. Let’s rewrite the Summary as we should have to begin with, matching up concepts when possible:
Government worthy of respect → Allow citizens to criticize
Government worthy of respect → Protect minorities
Therefore - Protect minorities → Allow citizens to criticize
There is absolutely a conditional logic flaw here, as the argument seems to chain together two statements that share a sufficient condition (it’s a reversal - flip one of the two premises around to see how the argument could work). Let’s find an answer that follows the same flawed pattern:
A → B
A → C
Therefore - B → C

Answer choices

  1. A
    Politicians are admirable if Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice A is not credited
    The second premise in this argument isn’t conditional - rather, it establishes the sufficient condition of the other premise. Therefore, this isn’t the correct answer.
  2. B
    All jazz musicians are Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice B matches the stem
    This argument features two conditional premises and a conditional conclusion, so we should diagram it out:

    Jazz musician → Capable of improvising

    Jazz musician → Capable of reading music (double negative cancels out)

    Therefore - Capable of reading music → Capable of improvising

    That’s the same as the stimulus. Yes, the conclusion takes the necessary condition of the second premise as the sufficient in the conclusion, but remember that the order of the premises doesn’t matter, and if the second had been given as the first premise, the logic wouldn’t change. This answer is therefore correct.
  3. C
    Ecosystems with cool, dry Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice C is not credited
    We can immediately eliminate this answer because the sufficient conditions don’t match up - the first is about ecosystems with cool, dry climates, and the second is about ecosystems populated by large mammals.
  4. D
    Some intellectuals are not Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice D is not credited
    This answer throws a quantifier into the first statement, changing the flaw up, so we can get rid of this answer right out of the gate!
  5. E
    First–person narratives reveal the Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice E is not credited
    The first premise has an AND necessary condition, and the second features a quantifier, so there are two reasons to eliminate it.

What this tests

Question analytics

Based on historical answer selection rates for this question.

Answer choice distribution

  1. A 10%
  2. B Credited 67%
  3. C 14%
  4. D 7%
  5. E 2%

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