Logical reasoning PrepTest 152 · Section 4 · Question 20

A fiendishly difficult answer choice to eliminate. While the author does state that writing down a password poses the greatest security threat of all, she doesn't make a value judgment about that, so an answer that states what people should do is unsupportable.

While the author does state that forgetting a password takes up the system administrator's time, there's no indication that that time is expensive. Maybe it's just annoying for the sysadmin!

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Facts

Question Type:
Must Be True

Stimulus Summary:
Safe passwords are hard. Easy-to-remember passwords are easy to guess. Safe passwords are hard to remember, and users write them down, making them the most insecure. Forgetting a password takes up time by the system administrator.

Answer Anticipation:
A lot of this question is going to be about simplifying the relatively complex language the given statements use. However, the concepts are luckily ones that most of us live with every day.

The facts given seem to revolve around the pros and cons of passwords that are easy and hard to remember. Throughout the statements, it seems a relatively balanced view, until that last statement, where it's stated that writing down a password is the greatest security threat of all. That's an extreme statement, and so it's likely to factor into the answer choice.

Answer Explanation:
Since difficult-to-remember passwords are generally written down, and that the greatest security threat, all other security threats must be less than that. Hence, this answer choice is supported.

Key Takeaway:
In Must Be True questions, extreme statements often lead to the correct answer. You should perk up when you see one and use it to help you find the correct answer.

The random letter/number passwords appear to be the ones that are written down, and are thus the greatest security threat, not the least likely to result in a breach.

While the takeaway here is that hard-to-remember passwords that are written down are a greater security threat than easy-to-remember ones, it doesn't follow that there's a scale that continues from easiest-to-remember being the most secure to hardest-to-remember being the least secure. "Password" is easier to remember than your anniversary, but the latter is still easy to remember and most likely more secure.