#9- Manuscripts written by first time authors generally do

[akalsi]

Hi,

I was having a bit of problem diagramming this question. I know its a parallel reasoning question, so we have to parallel the stimulus in the answer choice. However, I don't quite understand how B is the correct answer here.

Here was how I had diagrammed the stimulus:

Manuscript by first-time author get serious attention Celebrity

First time author and NOT celebrity unlikely to be taken seriously

I don't know if it was because I had diagrammed this incorrectly or not, but I just had a hard time understanding the relationships in this stimulus, which may have caused me to overlook answer choice B.

Could you please clarify what the correct way to diagram this stimulus would be and what the relationship/how it has changed from premise to conclusion?

Thanks in advance!

- Anoop

[Robert Carroll]

Anoop,

Your first conditional is fine, but it might be more clear if the sufficient condition is split up:

manuscript is by a first time author + the manuscript gets serious attention by publishers the author is a celebrity

The contrapositive is then:

the author is not a celebrity the manuscript is not by a first time author or the manuscript does not get serious attention by publishers

In the stimulus, the author is not a celebrity, so we know that it's necessary that either the manuscript is not by a first time author OR it does not get serious attention. As the author IS a first time author, that's not possible, so the other half of the OR statement has to happen in order for the contrapositive to be fulfilled. That is how the stimulus concludes, as it should.

Diagramming answer choice (B) the same way:

a fruit salad contains bananas + it is not boring it contains two or more exotic fruits

So the contrapositive:

a fruit salad contains fewer than two exotic fruits it does not contain bananas or it is boring

Note also that all of these conditionals are in fact not absolute; the stimulus says "generally" and answer choice (B) says "ordinarily." So our conditionals are really "most of the time" conditionals.

In order for (B) to parallel the stimulus, we need, as in the stimulus, the negation of a single necessary condition and the truth of one sufficient condition on a compound connected by "and" to lead to the negation of the other sufficient condition in the compound. Here, the fruit salad contains only one exotic fruit, so the negation of the original necessary is fulfilled. Further, the salad has bananas, so one sufficient condition is fulfilled. Thus, the other one should be negated - it should be boring. And it is, as required.

Robert Carroll

[akalsi]

Hi Robert,

Thanks so much for the clarification! That really helped me to understand this question and how to tackle it.

- Anoop

[pablourioste]

Hi Robert- thanks for your reply here. I'm looking over at how you diagramed the first conditional with the compounded clauses, and I guess I'm being thrown off by the use of negatives and "except" on the original stem. Could you clarify how to correctly diagram?

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Great question, pablourioste.

"Except" is a necessary condition indicator, but it's a bit of a special one. The idea of "except" includes the idea of a negation, so we diagram it using the "unless equation." That means we take the necessary condition as given, but negate the sufficient before putting it into the diagram. That way we accurately represent the negative component of the term "except."

Since our original statement in the stimulus has the word "not" with the serious attention phrase, we can negate the term just by removing that word. Thus our conditional becomes

Manuscript by first-time author AND gets serious attention celebrity author

Hope that helps!