Logical reasoning PrepTest 119 · Section 4 · Question 22

Incorrect. Self-motivated AND not Highly successful → not Well organized. There's no conditional relationship between being self-motivated and well organized, and this answer negates the connection between highly successful and well organized, so it can't be supported.

Incorrect. Well organized AND not Highly successful → Self-motivated. Similar to (A), there's no conditional relationship between being well organized and self-motivated, and this answer negates half of the conditional relationship between being highly successful and self-motivated. Therefore, it's unsupported.

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Facts

Question Type:
Must Be True

Stimulus Summary:
Highly successful salesperson → Well organized AND Self-motivated
Well-known to peers → Highly successful salesperson
Self-motivated → not Regret career choices

Answer Anticipation:
This Must Be True question relies heavily on conditional logic, but there are some tricks to it, so we should work through what we diagrammed first.

For the opening clause, it uses "all" as a sufficient condition indicator—relatively straightforward stuff! However, it does have a complex AND statement as the necessary condition. One thing to always think about with complex conditionals—can we split them if needed? Here, we can—AND necessary conditions can be split, as both conditions are guaranteed. As such, we can say that highly successful salespeople are well organized; and highly successful people are self-motivated.

The second half of that sentence could be diagrammed out, but it's a some statement since it's about "many" salespeople who aren't highly successful. However, since none of the other statements are about non-highly successful salespeople, or people who aren't either well organized or self-motivated, this won't allow us to form an inference. We should therefore discount it when anticipating an answer.

The third statement is a bit of a tricky only statement, but that introduces the necessary condition, as we diagrammed. And the last statement is a no statement, which can be tricky, but we diagrammed it here by having it introduce the sufficient condition and negating the necessary condition. If you used another method, you would have ended up with the contrapositive, which you then would have needed to contrapose to combine it with the other statements.

With all that diagrammed, we can now build a chain. The second statement builds straight into the first. Since we can split that first one, we can also chain one half of it into the third statement. This gives us:
Well-known → Highly successful → (Well organized AND) Self-motivated → not Regret career choices
Regret career choices → not Self-motivated → not Highly successful → not Well-known
not Well organized → not Highly successful → not Well-known

Note that in the first chain, we put the Well organized term in brackets to show that it slots in there but isn't really related to regret. And since regret doesn't tell us anything about being well organized, we split the contrapositive completely. Let's find an answer that mirrors either of these chains!

Answer Explanation:
Well-known → not Regret career choices. This answer matches our anticipation—it's the first chain we put together. This answer is therefore correct.

Key Takeaway:
Know which complex conditions (AND/OR) you can split, and how to work with those splits. Short version? AND in the necessary condition, and OR in the sufficient condition, can be split.

Incorrect. not Well organized → Regret career choices. There's no link between being well organized and regret in the stimulus, so this answer is unsupported.

Incorrect. not Regret career choices . . . is enough to eliminate this answer. Not regretting career choices is only a necessary condition, so this answer putting it in the sufficient condition must be wrong.