Hey Sherry,
Sure thing! First off, your process is spot on! Nice work! Still, since you asked for a walk through, let me break this question down and take it step by step.
This is a Justify question, so we need to provide new information in the correct answer choice that proves the conclusion is true. That in mind, let's begin with the conclusion.
The author concludes that any fruit that was inspected is safe to eat. The first thing to note about this is that "safe to eat" is totally new information, so it MUST be in the correct answer: you can't prove new info in a conclusion without tying that info back to some support premise(s)! Unfortunately all of the answers have "safe to eat," so that doesn't help us much here
Diagrammatically, the conclusion is:
Inspected
Safe to eat
So what do we know about the other piece of the conclusion, "inspected"? Well we're told that no fruit that was inspected is infected, or:
Inspected
Infected
This is actually a very common Justify scenario with conditional reasoning, and appears frequently in the easier Justify questions! You're told A
B, and then the author concludes A
C...how can you prove C comes from A, when all you know for sure is that B comes from A? Make C come from B: B
C! That would connect C to A through the shared variable, B, and give you a chain: A
B
C .
In this case, if we could show that
Infected indicated Safe to eat, we could make a chain:
Inspected
Infected Safe to eat
And from that chain we could connect the first piece, Inspected, to the last piece, Safe to eat, and in doing so prove our conclusion:
Inspected
Infected Safe to eat
Inspected
Safe to eat
So which answer choice provides us with
Infected Safe to eat? Answer choice (E), which means "if uninfected, then safe to eat":
Infected Safe to eat
A really great test of some fundamental conditional reasoning skills here, and a good indication of how you can prove conditional reasoning by creating chains that link pieces in a desired way.
Now, you may be wondering, "but what about the first sentence and the 'rotten' idea?" Turns out it's irrelevant here and plays no role in the argument. In other words it's there to distract you, but provides no help in proving the author's conclusion.
I hope that helps to reassure you, and clears up any uncertainties you might have had! Thanks again!
Jon