Logical reasoning PrepTest 140 · Section 2 · Question 21

Incorrect. The statement about manuscripts not being given serious attention only applies to nonfiction books, and there's no way to know if most unrequested manuscripts are fiction or nonfiction, so this answer isn't supported.

Incorrect. The publishing house publishes nonfiction works that are requested after careful review but not by renowned figures, and those could make up a majority of the published books not by renowned figures that the publishing house publishes.

Incorrect. First, let's say that this answer is suspect because it uses the phrase "careful consideration" and it's unclear which terms from the stimulus rise to that level (serious attention? careful review?). Ignoring that, however, the publishing house considers works of nonfiction that aren't by renowned figures that they request after a proposal review.

Incorrect. The stimulus doesn't compare the likelihood of things being considered, so this answer is out of scope.

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Facts

Question Type:
Must Be True

Stimulus Summary:

Published fiction books-most-Submitted by literary agents

Published fiction books-some-Submitted by writers upon request

not Renowned figure AND not Requested manuscript after proposal review → not Nonfiction book given serious attention

Answer Anticipation:
This stimulus features conditional ("unless") and quantifier ("Most"; "the rest") language, so we need to diagram the statements out and then see what inferences we can make by combining them.

Let's start by talking through our diagram. The first statement is a normal most statement. The second statement refers to "the rest" of the books of fiction published, and since the first statement talks about "most" books, fewer than half are left to fall into this category—hence the "some."

We treated "unless" as "if not" in that conditional statement. That negation ("if not") has to be applied to each term in the clause it applies to—so it negates both terms and the connecting OR, which becomes AND when negated.

One more thing to note before we look for inferences by combining the statements—that conditional statement is about nonfiction books, whereas the first two statements are about fiction books. That's a subtle shift, and one that will no doubt be used to try to trap you in a wrong answer. It's important to note these modifiers.

With that noted, we can see that the first two (quantified) statements don't share a term with the last one (the conditional) because they talk about different types of books. The first two statements do share a term, but we can never draw an inference from a most and a some statement together—they're not strong enough to guarantee an overlap.

Answer Explanation:
There are a lot of pieces in this answer, but they're all mentioned in the stimulus, so we should dig in. The "heart" of this answer is that these works have been published. We know that fiction books that are published were either submitted by an agent or upon request (since most are the former and the rest are the latter). That means this answer isn't talking about fiction books. From there, we're left with nonfiction books, which are either requested after a proposal review (which eliminates them from falling under this answer since it's about unrequested books), leaving only the nonfiction books by renowned figures—as this answer states.

Key Takeaway:
When an answer has a lot of moving parts that intersect with different parts of the stimulus, take it one piece at a time and work through the implications. Don't rush—that's how you end up making a mistake and taking longer!