Logical reasoning PrepTest 141 · Section 4 · Question 24

Incorrect. The premises already connect to establishing something about a thriving democracy, so this answer choice doesn't fill in the missing gap. This answer is a negation of the conclusion.

Incorrect. This answer is a reversal of one of the conditional premises.

Incorrect. This answer is a negation of the first conditional statement.

Incorrect. The stimulus never mentions exposure to biased information—just access to unbiased information. The negation of that also doesn't guarantee exposure to biased information—not having access to unbiased information could follow from having no information about the government! Since this answer raises a concept that isn't mentioned in the stimulus, it's out of scope.

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Argument

Valid or Flawed:
Flawed

Question Type:
Strengthen with Sufficient Premise

Stimulus Summary:
not Knowledgeable electorate → not Democracy thrives
Knowledgeable electorate → Access to unbiased info about government
Therefore: not Effective news media → not Democracy thrives

Answer Anticipation:
Diagramming out the statements is the first step to tackling this question efficiently.

First, we should see if we can combine any statements. The two premises share a term, and they'll chain together if we take the contrapositive of either. Let's use the conclusion to see what matches and doesn't, and use that to decide which to take the contrapositive of! Doing so highlights that the first conditional has an overlap, but the second doesn't, so we should take the contrapositive of the one that doesn't already line up:

not Access to unbiased info about the government → not Knowledgeable electorate

Now, let's combine the premises into a chain:

not Access to unbiased info on gov't → not Knowledgeable electorate → not Democracy thrives

And looking at the conclusion, we can see that this chain builds to the necessary condition there, but there's a gap between the chain and the conclusion's sufficient condition that the correct answer will need to bridge:

not Effective news media → not Access to unbiased info on gov't
Access to unbiased info on gov't → Effective news media

Answer Explanation:
This answer connects the necessary elements to allow the conclusion to follow from the premises. The conclusion featured a new term—Effective news media—that was a shift from the related term in the premises—Access to unbiased information. In bridging this gap, the answer justifies the conclusion.

Key Takeaway:
Strengthen with Sufficient Premise questions that feature conditional logic can be something that you drill until you can fly through. By diagramming out the conditionals, chaining them together, and seeing where the gaps are, you can have a very specific anticipation to apply to the answer choices, and then fly through them efficiently. There's nothing better than getting question #24 right in 60 seconds!