Logical reasoning PrepTest 156 · Section 4 · Question 6

Flawed

Identify the conclusion Identify the premise Determine the role played by the statement from the question stem.

For example ...

Premise Main conclusion Premise/conclusion

Find the answer choice that correctly expresses the role

On an Argument Structure question, an experienced test taker will first thoroughly deconstruct and understand the entire argument in the passage. Even though our job is to understand the role of the statement in the question stem, the benefits of understanding the whole argument are twofold. First, trying to figure out the role of the statement-in-question too early and without considering the entire argument can sometimes bias us and lead to an incorrect determination. Second, many answer choices will require us to know the roles of multiple propositions. (For instance, if the statement-in-question is a premise/conclusion, we'll probably also need to know which premise supports the premise/conclusion and which conclusion the premise/conclusion supports.) So, let's break down the anthropologists's entire argument, starting with the conclusion. The second part of the second sentence, which uses the pivot word "but," is the main conclusion. So, the conclusion asserts that ice-age nomads must have gotten food not from big-game hunting but from other sources like small animals and plants. The anthropologist supports this conclusion with three premises, further proving that the second part of the second sentence is the conclusion. The anthropologist claims that these ice-age nomadic communities needed 15-20 members to survive, these communities probably weren't much larger than 15-20 members, and big-game hunting would have risked the lives of these needed community members. In other words, big-game hunting was probably too risky for the community's well-being, so the community must have gotten their food from somewhere else. Now that we have broken down the entire argument, we can determine the role the statement-in-question serves. The statement-in-question is the first part of the second sentence. This claim says that ice-age nomads are commonly portrayed as primarily big-game hunters. As we saw, the anthropologist's conclusion rebuts this claim — the anthropologist argues that the ice-age nomads must have gotten their food from somewhere else. So, the statement from the question stem is a common portrayal that the anthropologist rebuts. Let's look for that in the answer choices.