chose D over A because of “often” in question passage
Started by
meghelle
· started 2022-03-23 20:36
· last activity 2022-03-25 02:11
· 1 reply
Like many others, I also chose D over A because I thought that the word “often” that was stated in the question indicated a quantifier, meaning that wealth often (sometimes or most of the time) is harmful. Thus, I ruled out A due to the fact that it did not have any quantifier language, and selected D because I thought it more suited, as it has a similar quantifier to the question.
So, why is D wrong over A?
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Emil-Kunkin
· 2022-03-25 02:11
Hi @Meghelle,
This is indeed a tricky one. Even though we have the "often" in the stimulus, it is not exactly serving as a quantifier, but is telling us that wealth can in fact be harmful.
The initial argument can be summarized as follows:
X is not Y, because Y is never Z, but X is often Z.
This is a valid argument- we are concluding that wealth is not good because good things are never harmful, but wealth is harmful.
D tells us that a dog is not a dachshund because he hunts well, but most dachshunds hunt poorly.
We could summarize as : X is not Y, because X is Z, and most Ys are not Z.
Not only does this not match the initial pattern of reasoning, but this is actually not a valid argument! Just because most dachshunds are bad hunters does not mean that this particular dachshund is a bad hunter. This would be akin to saying that Bryce Harper is not the MVP because most people are bad at baseball, and he is a person.
A could be summarized as
X is Z, and No Zs are Y, thus A is not Y.
While it changes the order slightly, the argument structure is the same as in the stimulus.
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