Logical reasoning PrepTest 139 · Section 1 · Question 12

Incorrect. The necessary condition for a sincere apology is not to intend to commit the act again, so one could apologize sincerely but accidentally commit that same act. This answer is thus unjustified.

Incorrect. Sincerely accepting an apology requires only that one acknowledge a wrong without holding a grudge—there's no requirement that it be a sincerely offered apology.

Incorrect. There's a necessary condition for when you should apologize, but not a sufficient condition as this answer states.

Incorrect. There's no statement that tells us what is true of an apology that can't be sincerely accepted, just what is true when an apology is sincerely accepted.

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Facts

Question Type:
Must Be True

Stimulus Summary:
(1) Should apologize → Person you wronged
(2) Apologize sincerely → Acknowledge you did wrong
(3) Intend to repeat act → not Apologize sincerely
(4) Sincerely accept apology → Acknowledge a wrong without holding a grudge

Answer Anticipation:
Before we get into the details of our anticipation, let's talk about these conditionals. For #1, there were two necessary conditions that we mashed together—as long as they're both individually true, then they both must be true together, so you can combine them like this (we did something similar in #4). Statements #2 and #4 also talk about what something "is"—that sets up a necessary condition for that thing. Why does this work? Think about the second statement—acknowledging you did wrong isn't sufficient for an apology to be sincere since you could acknowledge it and laugh at the person. So it must be necessary—if you don't acknowledge wrong-doing, you can't apologize sincerely. For statement #3, we treated "unless" as "if not"—if you diagrammed it as the contrapositive, nothing wrong with that!

This stimulus starts with a long discussion about apologizing, and a single statement about sincerely accepting an apology. As such, the answer is much more likely to be derived from those statements about apologizing, as the last statement doesn't overlap with the other statements. That said, we still want to have it diagrammed out, as an answer certainly could combine that statement with another statement about apologizing. If it does, it'll likely deal with acknowledgement, since that's a part of both apologizing sincerely and accepting a policy sincerely.

Moving to the statements about apologizing, the second and third conditionals will share a sufficient condition if we take the contrapositive of #3, but that doesn't help us. That was a short trip! We're left with where we were at the end of the last paragraph—there's not a lot of conditional chaining here, just a lot of talking about the same content, so let's head to the answers to see what we can support. Expect a generalization from the conditionals provided or a simple restating of a few of them.

Answer Explanation:
Acknowledgement of the wrong is a requirement of both sincerely offering and accepting an apology, so failing to acknowledge the wrongness of the act prevents sincere apologies from being offered and accepted. This answer is justified by conditionals #2 and #4.Answer choice explanations:

Key Takeaway:
When conditionals don't overlap to form a chain, see which ones discuss the same content. The correct answer might end up drawing an inference by combining them in a manner that falls outside the norm.