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Unfortunately, I don't have a specific test question as an example -- so I'll have to explain a hypothetical. If you have a parallel reasoning question in which the reasoning structure of the question stem and one of the answer choice matches up, but the only difference is one makes a positive conclusion, while the other makes a negative conclusion, do you think the answer choice would still be correct?

Ex: Question stem has cause + effect reasoning and has a conclusion that something is true; answer choice has cause + effect reasoning and has a conclusion that something is NOT true.

Could the reasoning in this question stem/answer-choice be considered parallel?

Postive and negative terms are just facts, they don't necessarily change the logical structure of a passage.

A --> B ---> C, therefore A --> C

~X --> Y ---> ~Z, therefore ~X --> ~Z

Those two arguments are parallel, they arrive at their conclusion via the same method of reasoning.

However, in the particular instance you mention, I don't think the argument would be parallel, though I'd have to see the actual argument to be sure. Since the crucial part of one of the arguments is that a causal connection exists, but the other argument concludes a causal connection doesn't exist, those are different argument methods.

ihaslsats wrote:Unfortunately, I don't have a specific test question as an example -- so I'll have to explain a hypothetical. If you have a parallel reasoning question in which the reasoning structure of the question stem and one of the answer choice matches up, but the only difference is one makes a positive conclusion, while the other makes a negative conclusion, do you think the answer choice would still be correct?

Ex: Question stem has cause + effect reasoning and has a conclusion that something is true; answer choice has cause + effect reasoning and has a conclusion that something is NOT true.

Could the reasoning in this question stem/answer-choice be considered parallel?

Banned for alting.