Logical reasoning PrepTest 136 · Section 2 · Question 9

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Facts

Question Type:
Strengthen/Illustration

Stimulus Summary:
Game - One person leaves the room and is told that someone else will tell their dream to the others. Instead, the room comes up with an arbitrary rule for answering yes/no questions.
Outcome - The person who left, after asking questions, ends up coming up with a clever, coherent dream.

Answer Anticipation:
This question stem asks us to find a proposition that the example conforms to. That's a bit of a split between a Strengthen question (or a Strengthen (Principle) question) and an Illustration question. Whatever the case, we should clearly define our task—to take the example in the stimulus and find a generalization that would help to explain it.

Here, the game involves answering questions in an arbitrary manner, while someone else constructs a coherent narrative out of it based on their belief that there is a coherent narrative behind the questions—they were told the answers are about someone's dream.

So the generalization should say something about someone believing that there's coherence behind something will find coherence in it.

Answer Explanation:
The person who left the room assumed that there was a dream directing the answers to the questions. That belief led them to take the random answers to the yes/no questions to create a coherent narrative. The party game is an example of this generalization, so this is the correct answer.

Key Takeaway:
When you come across a non-standard question stem, don't get too wrapped up in what exact question type it falls into. It's better to understand what it's asking than to have it classified in the exact manner that we would.

Incorrect. While the answers to the yes/no questions might be based on an arbitrary rule, that doesn't mean the person asking is getting a "false understanding" of the answer—there isn't much of a way to misinterpret a yes/no answer to a yes/no question!

Incorrect. Since the example in the stimulus is about someone constructing a coherent dream narrative from these random answers, if anything, it serves as a counterexample to this answer.

Incorrect. There's no interpretation of a dream occurring because there's no actual dream involved in this example!

Incorrect. While the clever and coherent dream narrative constructed here is invented, it wasn't to explain the questioner's behavior.