more CR strategies pertaining to FIND THE ASSUMPTION and DRAW A CONCUSION problems:
* when you go through critical reasoning passages, you need to be able to sort out IRRELEVANT INFORMATION. there are 2 kinds:
- (a) parts of "conclusions" that really aren't conclusions at all. there's a simple way to tell whether this happens: if something isn't mentioned in the premises, then it can't possibly be part of the conclusion. in other words, the conclusion actually has to come FROM the premises, so anything not in the premises can't be part of the conclusion.
- (b) "bowling pins" or "setup statements": if a passage starts out by telling you some piece of information and then constructs an argument for the sole purpose of proving that statement wrong, then the initial statement (the "bowling pin") doesn't even count as part of the argument.
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when you're looking for an ASSUMPTION or trying to draw a CONCLUSION, remember that those things can NEVER, ever, be more general than the premises you start with. for instance, if a passage talks about weightlifting, you CANNOT have assumptions regarding "exercise" in general - because any other exercise is irrelevant to / out of the scope of the passage.
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remember that assumptions are things that MUST be true. because of this, there's another way that you can attack assumption problems, if necessary:
- REVERSE the assumption in the answer choice, and see if the argument FALLS APART. if it doesn't, then the assumption is not required.
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on ALL critical reasoning questions, but especially on "find the assumption" and "draw a conclusion", you need to be able to do the following 2 things:
- (1) learn to treat all SPECIFICS as objective, judgment-free things. for instance, in problem #V63, "easily" (in choice c) should be treated as would any other mention of an irrelevant specific. in other words, just because "easily" is a common word that's thrown around a lot in conversation doesn't mean you can gloss over it in the answer choice. you should pay absolutely as much attention to it as you would to something like "decisions should be made in blue jeans".
- (2) learn to treat ANY SPECIFICS THAT ARE AT ALL DIFFERENT as COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. in other words, in CR land, there are only two possibilities: (a) two things are exactly the same, or (b) they are completely unrelated without evidence. in CR land, there is no such thing as "similar" or "like each other". so you should get to the point where 2 things such as "people who commit murder" and "people convicted of murder" sound COMPLETELY unrelated, just because they're not exactly the same.
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* if an argument contains a conditional (an "if-then" statement), then any statement for which the IF part is FALSE lies outside the scope of the passage. for instance, if i say "i like redheads", then that's "if she's a redhead, then i'll like her". therefore, any non-redheads are outside the scope of this argument.
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when you draw conclusions, your conclusions have to be PERFECTLY DEDUCTIVE. they CANNOT MAKE ANY ADDITIONAL ASSUMPTIONS, no matter how seemingly trivial.
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you're not allowed to have "vacuously true" statements as conclusions. for instance, in the port blockade problem (og#101), you can deduce from the passage that the blockade won't be successful. therefore, anything starting with "if the blockade is successful..." should be considered out of scope.
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when you draw conclusions, you MUST remember that your conclusions NEED TO STAY DEDUCTIVE. among other things, this means that you ABSOLUTELY CANNOT EXTRAPOLATE, even by a little bit.
- ex: there's one OG problem about fish catch and rainforests. in that problem, you have to limit yourself to ... fish catch and rainforests. you CANNOT generalize to "nature".
Ron has been teaching various standardized tests for 20 years.
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