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Hey y'all. I'm signed up for the Sep exam and going over my mistakes on LR, it's mostly necessary assumption, weaken, and principle questions. I just had some questions that I was hoping someone can help answer that'll make it easier for me to wrap my head around the concepts.

For necessary assumptions - Am I suppose to be more focused on looking for an answer that is necessary for the conclusion, support, and/or the gap/assumption to be true? When applying the negation test, what happens if the answer that I negate causes one of the premises to not be true? If a premise is not true, doesn't that destroy the whole argument too?

For weaken questions - Same kind of question as above, but should the answer weaken the conclusion, support, and/or the gap/assumption? I'm also having trouble figuring out the difference between out of scope questions between necessary and weaken questions.

For principle questions - Is the principle suppose to be a more generalized or specific rule that can be applied to the argument? I'm always able to narrow it down to two but don't really know where to go from there.

Thanks in advance!

Necessary Assumption - You have to find whatever assumption (connection) is necessary for the conclusion that was made to be valid. "All A are B. All C are D. Therefor all A are D. The "Necessary Assumption" here is that all B are C. Kind of rudimentary but that's what you need - the missing link.

For the weaken question - you want to weaken the overall strength of the argument, and the way to do that is to break down and damage one of the premises of this. It doesn't have to disprove the conclusion entirely, it just has to weaken it, by any amount. This can get difficult sometimes as more complicated correct answers may only weaken the overall argument a small amount (but still more than other questions). There are different types of qualified responses for questions like these (at least for Strengthen, you have Defenders that defend the argument and attackers that attack counter arguments). If you haven't already, definitely pick up and read through the Powerscore LR Bible as it'll do a much better job at explaining this than I can.

Principle - you'll get some in both directions, typically these are A) Apply the principle, where you apply one abstract principle to five specific situations, and you'll have the opposite, where you have one specific situation and you have to choose which of five abstract principles it most represents.