Logical reasoning PrepTest 126 · Section 3 · Question 21

Question prompt

Any student who is Remaining source text redacted.
Why the credited answer is right

Credited answer: A

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

Strengthen with Sufficient Premise Questions

Stimulus Summary

Student not required to hand in written homework → ~Complete all reading assignments
Therefore - Students given several reading but no written assignments → No student will receive a high grade

Answer Anticipation

A couple notes on the conditional logic here.
First, the first and last term could have been written out as negations, but there are actually some weird implications of any way you could write it out. Including the actual negated term in the statement made it easier for us to remember what, exactly, was said. For example, if we had written the sufficient condition of the premise as ~Student required to hand in written homework, then that could imply that there are no students. Don’t get so locked in being “technically” correct that you lose the meaning - use conditional logic as a tool to enhance understanding.
Second, note that we didn’t include the second sentence. Why not? Because it adds nothing to the first. Highly motivated students are a subset of all students, and all students are already discussed in the first premise. There’s no need to clutter up our diagram, so we skipped it!
With that out of the way, we can check to see how the premise and conclusion overlap. When we wrote out our diagram, we had the sufficient conditions of the statements phrased slightly differently, but looking at it during our anticipation, we can see that they’re equivalent, so there’s no gap there. However, there is a huge gap between the necessary conditions - not completing all the reading assignments in no way guarantees that a student won’t receive a high grade.

Answer choices

  1. A
    No student who completes Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice A matches the stem
    ~Complete all reading assignments → ~Receive a high grade. This answer bridges the gap between the conditional in the premise and in the conclusion, so it’s the correct answer.
  2. B
    Any student who completes Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice B is not credited
    Completes all reading assignments → Receive a high grade. This answer is a negation of the argument’s assumption.
  3. C
    All highly motivated students Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice C is not credited
    This answer applies only to the highly motivated students, whereas the conclusion of the argument is about all students, so we can throw it out just based on that.
  4. D
    If highly motivated students Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice D is not credited
    This answer is the negation of the conditional premise.
  5. E
    Some highly motivated students Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice E is not credited
    The conclusion is a conditional, so this answer about “some” students - let alone some “highly motivated” students - is too weak/limited to justify the stronger and broader conclusion.

What this tests

Question analytics

Based on historical answer selection rates for this question.

Answer choice distribution

  1. A Credited 71%
  2. B 11%
  3. C 3%
  4. D 6%
  5. E 8%

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