#21 - Maté is a beverage found in much of South America.

[Brook Miscoski]

Alex,

I am trying to understand your question, because it seems like you are arguing a general point instead of asking anything about Question #21 from the June 2015 test, LR Section 3. It seems to me like Jonathan is trying to help Oakenshield by focusing on the core elements of his question. Jonathan has correctly pointed out that "The more x, the more y" describes a proportional, relationship, and he is not focused on whether the x and y can be reversed since that is not the critical issue for the people who asked the question.

If you have a question about that in the context of this Question #21, please let me know so I can figure out how to best help you here. Thanks!

[ghostpants]

Hello, I have to admit this question is really throwing me for a loop. The explanation given for answer choice A being incorrect isn't flowing coherently for me at the moment. In my mind it seems that the same logic that is given for ruling out answer choice A, as in type of varieties could potentially only be 2 and everywhere else could be 1, could equally be applied to answer choice E. Two people could be using Mate in Paraguay and only one person in every other South American country. Could you help me better understand why answer choice A is incorrect and why E is a better choice?

[Adam Tyson]

I see a few problems with answer A, ghostpants. One is that it tells us nothing about the origin, but only a little bit about the relationship between variety and duration. We don't know which places have a great variety, but maybe a lot of places do? We also don't know how long maté has been in use anywhere, so no way to know what "a very long time" is relative to these countries. Maybe maté has been used for a very long time and has great variety in Bolovia, and in Guatemala, and in Ecuador? Nothing about A helps us to understand where maté began. Even if A is true, it gives us no reason to believe that it originated in Paraguay.

But answer E gives us an important relative relationship. We already know that Paraguay has more variety than any other place and is more widely used than anywhere else. Answer E tells us that those relative relationships have some bearing on how long it has been in use, and the place where it has been used the longest is probably the place where it originated.

The short answer is that A deals with "a very long time," which does nothing to compare one place to another, while E tells us about "longer," which is a relative terms that allows us to compare places. The correct answer needs to help with that comparison.

[ghostpants]

Thanks Adam, your reply did help me sort this out. I see now that in tying the answers back to the stimulus, with answer choice E, the use of the word "longer" correlates the wider usage with a longer period of time. In a diluted way, this answer choice is saying that as one variable increases, so does the other. With answer choice A, the varieties of mate is not distinctly tied to the variable of time in a way that would allow one to use that information to correlate the varieties of mate to origination in that region.

[Dancingbambarina]

I got this answer correct, but just a question, please:

Is a corelation the equivalent of a bi-conditional statement i.e. one that can go both ways. So we could put either as the sufficient / necessary given the other element is the sufficient / necessary?

[Adam Tyson]

To say that two things are correlated does create a two-way relationship, Dancingbambarina, but that doesn't mean it is or should be treated as a conditional relationship. Don't try to force conditionality on these kinds of problems. If I say that there is a strong correlation between drinking coffee and having insomnia, that's not the same as saying that someone drinks coffee if and only if they have insomnia. It's more of a general tendency, while conditional relationships are absolute guarantees. Most arguments that are based on correlation will be causal, not conditional, so trying to convert that correlation into a conditional relationship is not only unnecessary, it may be counter-productive, causing you to mix up your reasoning types, which can lead to wrong answers looking good and correct answers looking bad.

Save conditional analysis for arguments that are clearly based on conditional relationships.