Critical Reasoning

lunarpower wrote:more generally, just about every single strengthening/weakening/evaluating/explaining problem on this test WILL require additional, reasonable, ordinary-person-on-the-street assumptions.
in fact, that's the entire point of these problems -- you can't solve them by "rules" or "formal logic", but you can solve them if you interpret the problem statements as "the crowd" would.

here you aren't really making any additional assumptions; you just have to interpret the language of the answer choice in a certain way.
on the other hand, you do have to make assumptions to get these problems to work. for instance,
* in og12 #109 (which i think is og13 #110) -- the "fire alarm call box" problem -- you have to assume that people won't do bad things as much if they know there's a high risk of being caught.
* in og12 #65 (which i think is og13 #64) -- the "kourion" problem -- you have to dismiss other explanations for the sudden cessation of coin production in the correct answer choice. (Did they suddenly switch to paper money in that year? Not strictly unreasonable, but... nah. Did a particularly smart emperor recognize the signs of inflation, and put a halt to the coin production to forestall that inflation? Again, not strictly unreasonable, but, let's keep our feet on the ground here.)

etc.
be VERY careful that you are not being too "academic" or "nitpicky" about reading CR problems. that's exactly the mentality they are designed to thwart.

lunarpower wrote:i did, however, notice that you're not arguing in favor of any of the other answer choices.
see, that's the saving grace here: these are multiple-choice problems. so, if you have a quibble about one of the answer choices, then you need to put your money on another choice, or else there's not much validity in the complaint.

in this case, again, i can see what you mean here, and i agree that the wording is a little weird. (not crazy, but a little weird.)
however, unless one of the other answer choices actually looked good enough for you to pick it INSTEAD of this one, this should have been a non-issue -- you should have disliked all those other choices enough to return to (e) and say, "hmm, ok, maybe this doesn't mean what i thought it meant the first time."

i mean, myself, i misread these things all the time. (dyslexia is fun!) so i'm not just talking at you here -- this is a process that i go through myself on practically every single problem.
"ok, i think this means xxxx."
"wait a minute ..."
etc.
so, yeah. just remember that, at the end of the day, one of the answer choices has to be the correct answer choice.