Logical reasoning PrepTest 149 · Section 4 · Question 24

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Facts

Question Type:
Must Be True

Stimulus Summary:
Unemployed artist → Sympathetic to social justice
Employed artist → not Interested in great personal fame

Answer Anticipation:
First, it's important to think about those two sufficient conditions—do they overlap, or is there a difference between someone who isn't unemployed and someone who is employed? There's no middle ground there—you're either employed or you aren't, so we should rewrite out that first conditional:

not Employed artist → Sympathetic to social justice

From there, since the shared term is on the same side of the arrow but negated, we need to take the contrapositive of one to chain the two conditionals together. It doesn't matter which since we'll be taking the contrapositive of the chain to make answer choice analysis easier:

not Sympathetic to social justice → Employed artist → not Interested in fame
Interested in fame → not Employed artist → Sympathetic to social justice

Now it's just a matter of diagramming out the answer choices to find one that matches.

Answer Explanation:
Interested in fame → Sympathetic to social justice. This is the contrapositive of our chain, so it's the correct answer.

Key Takeaway:
If your conditional logic skills are strong, you can fly through this question in under a minute. Practice them so you can pick up a few points like this without a lot of time or effort, freeing yourself up to spend more time on harder questions!

Incorrect. not Interested in fame → . . . Don't keep going! not Interested in fame was a necessary condition of the chain, not a sufficient condition, so this can't be correct.

Incorrect. not Employed artist → Interested in fame. This is an illegal reversal of the contrapositive of the chain (or an illegal negation of the initial chain).

Incorrect. Sympathetic to social justice is a necessary condition in the chain, so this answer with it in the sufficient condition can be eliminated immediately.

Incorrect. Either/or statements can be diagrammed as: If not one, then the other. We should take the time to see if this matches the stimulus since there are some chunks of the chain that conform to that pattern: not Sympathetic to social justice → Interested in fame. However, diagramming it out, we see that it doesn't match the chain (not Sympathetic to social justice guarantees not Interested in fame), so this answer is incorrect.