Preptest 22, section 2, #25 Forum

[applemaroon]

Oh this question......

Can someone explain how to solve this? Thanks!

[jitsubruin]

This one got me too. Anything after only if is a necessary condition and the prompt treats it as a sufficient condition. sorry not good at explaining it on my phone. does that make sense?

[Nat Sherman]

This one was very confusing, but you have to pay attention to the wording. The premise says that 35% believe that elected officials should resign ONLY if they are convicted of a crime, where as the conclusion says "more people believe that elected officials should resign if indicted than believe that they should resign if convicted."

Those 35% believe they should resign if the official is ONLY convicted. There's a whole other 65% that is unaccounted for. Those 65% could believe that an official should resign if convicted along with something else such as a money laundering scheme. So theoretically, 100% could believe that the official should resign if convicted, therefore the conclusion is wrong, which is why we are looking for a flaw.

The necessary condition is is that they resign (They resign if only convicted, if anything else happens then they shouldn't resign), and the sufficient conditions being that they were convicted. The conclusion however is saying that they should resign if convicted. The necessary condition for that being convicted, and the sufficient condition being they resign.

Premise: Resign ----> Convicted
Conclusion: Convicted ----> Resign

In short, the premise says that the only reason an elected official should resign is if they are convicted, where the conclusion says if they are convicted, they should resign. That leaves us with answer B, that it "confuses a sufficient condition with a required condition."

[TylerJonesMPLS]

This is a really tricky one. I think I agree with the poster above, but I’m a little confused by his explanation, so I’m going to put out my own explanation.

The premises are:

(1) 50% think:
If Elected Officials Are Indicted, Then They Should Resign.

(2) 35% think:
If Elected Officials Should Resign, Then They Were Convicted.

The conclusion (that doesn’t follow) is:

(3) More people think:
(3a) If Elected Officials Are Indicted, Then They Should Resign
than people think:
(3b) If Elected Officials Are Convicted, Then They Should Resign.

The flaw is that (2) and (3b) are not the same statement.
The sufficient condition and the necessary condition of (2) have been reversed in (3a), so that (3a) is saying something entirely different from (2).

(2) says If Officials Should Resign, Then They They Were Convicted. That is, if you are an official, and you find yourself in the position of having the moral obligation to resign, then you must have been convicted of a crime.

(3b) says If Officials Are Convicted, Then They Should Resign. That is, if you are an official and you find yourself in the position of having been convicted of a crime, then you must have the moral obligation to resign.

The trick is that the passage/stimulus is misdirecting you. Usually, if there are percentages in the passage/stimulus, the flaw will be some mistake in the percentages. So when you see this question, you naturally start trying to figure out something wrong with the percentages, and this distracts you from finding the premises and conclusion. Of course, once you do find the premises and conclusion, the question becomes easy.

So, I guess the moral is, in flaw questions don’t just guess what kind of flaw it is and start working on that before you have found the premises and conclusion. Until you have found the premises and conclusion, you don’t really understand the passage, so it’s easy for the evil LSAC to trick you.