manchas wrote:Hi Mike - Hope you're doing well. Need your help to assess whether I approached this question correctly. It's Q23 from the first LR section from the June '14 exam. For the life of me, i couldn't isolate what the gap was in this question dealing with phenezines and bacteria. Because there seemed to be no support given for the conclusion in the stimulus, it seemed that I was being asked to merely strengthen a conclusion. Did I misread something or was this a unusual question that just asked me to strength a claim and to an argument?
And the correct answer choice - which I only got to thru process of elimination - was so unexpected and not something that I could ever have conjured up prior to going to the choices. And it's STILL unnerves me! By my understanding (A) seems almost to be the type of strengthener you would select if you were asked to strengthen a causal argument. ( i.e. if one were to trying to strengthen A causes B, one could strengthen by showing that when A is not around, neither is B). But there was no causal argument in 23, was there? So confused on this one.
These are the reasons why I eliminated the other choices, but I am still so unsure of this q that I would really appreciate if you could verify if these were based on sound reasoning. To simplify things, I'll use your "constellation of wrong answers" that you discussed in the book.
B. attractive for me because it touched upon the "fending off bacteria" issue from the first sentence in the stimulus, but ultimately wrong because it doesn't relate to the conclusion.
C. a false comparison that's unrelated to the stimulus ?
D. same as (B); strengthens the first idea in the stimulus but fails to relate to the conclusion.
E. eliminated this cuz it seemed to actually do the opposite and if anything, seemed to weaken the hypothesis by suggesting that P doesn't help interior bacteria.
Thanks and sorry for the excruciating detail.
Hey --
Appreciate the detail and I’m guessing my response will be even longer --
This is a great problem -- I imagine that pretty much everyone who saw this on the exam had a “What the…” moment -- I know did when I just tried it --
And I think you did a great job thinking through it (and getting it right even though you didn’t totally feel comfortable) -- the one big issue was that you stretched too hard to find an argument when there wasn’t one --
I talk a lot about tendencies and twists in the trainer, and I think it can really be helpful to think of harder or more unusual q’s on these terms --
The big twists included here are that
a) the stimulus doesn’t include an argument &
b) the right answer is far more unique than is the norm
Notice the question asks us to strengthen a hypothesis -- hypothesis is the equivalent of “claim” or “conclusion,” rather than an equivalent of “reasoning” or “argument.”
When we go into the stimulus, we can see that there is background, and a conclusion, but no support. Without support, we don’t have an argument.
We can tell that the background is not meant to serve as support because we don’t have any terms that indicate a support-conclusion relationship (such as therefore or thus) and instead only have the term “also,” which indicates that the roles (fending off bacteria and getting stuff to the interior bacteria) are part of a list together rather than having some sort of connection to one another.
So, this is one of those rare S/W q’s for which there is no argument given (I would guess they appear roughly once every 5 to 10 exams) and our job isn’t to strengthen the reasoning, but rather just the conclusion.
Knowing that this is an unusual situation, and also having a bit of bias knowing this is #23 and so probably tough, going into the answer choices, I’m very careful --
The right answer needs to support something very specific -- the idea that phanazines give interior bacteria access to essential nutrients from the outside environment. My guess is that the right answer will support in an unusual way (though I certainly didn’t expect anything like A).
What can we expect from wrong answer?
1 - they won’t relate to the conclusion -- in this case, the only other thing they can relate to is the b.g., so I can almost guarantee there will be choices that connect to the b.g. info but not in a way that relates to the actual point in the conclusion.
or
2 - if they do relate to the conclusion, there must be no possible way they can strengthen (without being restricted to some argument, this is a pretty wide net of possibilities for how answers could strengthen) -- almost the only option the test writer has for this second type of wrong answer is to make it extremely blatant that it plays the opposite role -- that is, the info given relates but could only, if true, weaken the conclusion rather than strengthen it.
Okay, with all that said --
(A) seemed super unattractive to me, but I kept it just because of “increasing number of bacteria in direct contact with the surrounding environment” which has a suspicious relationship to “interior bacteria” in the stimulus (in retrospect, easier to see that it produces opposite of having interior bacteria).
(B) relates to the background info, and not in any way that can be used to support the conclusion - so we can cut it.
(C), if anything, weakens the potential that phenazines help survival, and so we can cut it as well.
(D) relates to the background info, and not in any way that can be used to support the conclusion, so we can cut it as well.
(E) actually tempted me a lot at first (I think in part because I didn’t believe (A) could be correct and I was running out of options) -- so I had to think about it very carefully -- while (E) relates phenazines, interior, and non-interior bacteria, it does so in way that doesn’t help show that the phenazines help get nutrients to the inside -- again, like (C), if anything, it goes against the idea that phenazines help interior survival.
So, super-hard and unusual q, and so as is common our elimination skills can be of huge help here --
Going back to (A) -- what it tells us is that bacterial colonies that don’t produce phenazines have another method by which they deal with issues of “interior” bacteria -- they shape themselves in such a way that more of the bacteria are closer to the perimeter and not on the interior.
So, if colonies without P are designed to prevent bacteria from being in the interior, it can strengthen the potential that perhaps, for the colonies with P that have interior bacteria, the P aids in the survival of that bacteria.
That’s a really round-about way to strengthen, and one that’s very tough to see -- here’s an analogous situation to show it a bit more clearly.
“John wears sunglasses to protect his eyes from the sun. It also seems he wears them to help correct his vision.”
Notice, this structure makes it clear that the protection from the sun isn’t meant to relate to the correcting the vision in any way -- it’s just b.g. and a conclusion.
Now imagine this strengthener: “Whenever John doesn’t wear the sunglasses, he wears contact lenses.”
So, when the sunglasses aren’t there, he uses something else for the eyesight issue. This can help strengthen the claim that perhaps he uses the sunglasses to correct his vision.
Does it make the conclusion airtight? Absolutely not. It’s got more holes than swiss cheese. But I hope you can see how it does strengthen just a bit. Same thing going on here.
Yikes - sorry for the length -- again, great q -- it’s extremely unusual for a S/W to ask just about a conclusion, rather than an argument, and that seems to be what got you started off on the wrong foot -- hope that helps clear things up a bit --
Best,
Mike