agalfano wrote:Ok real quick can I have some help with LR Test 18, Section 4, Question 25...
I was drilling Flaw Questions and I was 99% sure that A was the correct answer, although when I looked at E I thought to myself "hmmm, this sounds interesting, but this answer doesn't match the flaw." Needless to say, when I saw that the answer was E I immediately jumped out of my seat and took a 30 minute break because I was so frustrated!! Love to hear your insight! Ughhhh
This is a classic case where the incorrect flaw sounds AWFULLY CLOSE, and is in simple language, while the correct answer matches perfectly but flips to difficult/genericized/fancy language. But it also sounds like you might have gone astray in your original evaluation of what George's error was, even before you got to the answer choices...
Sort out the pieces:
- CLAIM: children that are read-to are MORE LIKELY to become adults that like reading
PREMISE: That wasn't true for Emory or me.
CONCLUSION: That claim is false.
The author's flaw is that he thinks his experience/Emory's experience are enough to refute a claim of LIKELIHOOD.
Answer choice
(A) starts off sounding pretty good - but what about "experiences of other people"? George never pits his/Emory's experience against
other people's experiences. That's never mentioned! It's never even implied. Perhaps if he'd said "Even though many children that are read to grow up to like reading, that's not what happened to Emory" - that would be treating his cousin's experience as though it had more weight than the experiences of other people.
As it is, though, George never even references any experiences of other people. All we know is that he believes that his/Emory's experiences refute the claim. Who knows, he might even believe that EVERYONE's experiences are actually exactly identical to his/Emory's experiences! We just don't know!
(E) puts the language into abstraction, so let's break out what it's actually saying:
"He attempts to refute a general claim [CLAIM above] by reference to nonconforming cases [George & Emory are non-conforming to the CLAIM], although the claim is consistent [the non-conformists don't disprove the claim] with the occurrence of such cases."
So, this answer is saying that the flaw is that the "nonconforming cases" that George uses as evidence (himself and Emory's experiences) are CONSISTENT with the claim, which just means that the cases and the claim don't conflict! And that's true! It's entirely possible for the claim to be true (it's more LIKELY!) AND for George and Emory's experiences to happen.
Broken down into simpler language,
(E) is saying "George tries to disprove the claim by showing that what happened to him/Emory is different. But, since the claim is just a claim of LIKELIHOOD, their experiences don't disprove that LIKELIHOOD, even though they experienced something different."
What do you think?
