Logical Reasoning

PT103 · S1 · Q13 Some people think that in every

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Some people think that in every barrel of politicians there are only a few rotten ones.

Facts

conditionals (if / all / must / never)

Deceit is rotten → all effective are rotten.

rephrase Effectiveness requires deceit Effective → Deceit

(When it says , they are reiterating the same fact that effectiveness/proper job performance requires deceitfulness).

Scrupulously honest → ~Effective Politician

Evaluate

The #1 thing to read for on MBT and MBF is conditional logic.

We start with a wishy-washy attribution, and then we get into three sentences that each look like conditional ideas. The 2nd and 3rd sentences effectively mean the same thing: .

And the 4th sentence is really kind of another reiteration of that! It's saying .

Goal

The correct answer to MBF usually contradicts a conditional we're given or contradicts some MBT inference we can make by combining claims.

We can't really combine any of these claims, since all three rules essentially said the same thing,

So it's likely that the correct answer just contradicts this idea by making it seem like there is some effective politician out there who never lies.

13.

Assuming that the author's statements are accurate, which one of the following statements CANNOT be true?

  1. Some people think all politicians

    Compatible

    This is just a fact about what some people think. We were previously only told that some ppl think there are only a few rotten politicians in every barrel. This would contradict that idea, but it's not a contradiction to say "some people believe only a few are rotten" and "some people think all of them are rotten".

    2% picked this

  2. Some politicians are scrupulously honest.

    Compatible

    The passage allows for there to be scrupulously honest politicians, as long as they're not EFFECTIVE. It would say no EFFECTIVE politicians are scrupulously honest, but it never said no politicians are scrupulously honest.

    5% picked this

  3. Some people define a politician’s

    Compatible

    To contradict this claim, we would have needed to read that "NO ONE defines a politician's job as obeying the rules of society". We were never told that. The only statement about people's beliefs is the first sentence, which doesn't mention obeying rules and wouldn't be strong enough to tell us that "NO ONE defines X as Y."

    3% picked this

  4. Some deceitful politicians are ineffective.

    Compatible

    This might look at first glance like we're contradicting a conditional, but the conditionals say effective → deceitful Deceitful doesn't guarantee effectiveness (it's required), so saying that some deceitful are ineffective doesn't contradict what we have. Contradicting a conditional always means saying that the trigger is true but the outcome is false: someone is effective, but not deceitful This is doing deceitful but not effective (trigger false, outcome true).

    6% picked this

  5. Correct

    Some scrupulously honest politicians are

    Why this is right

    Yup, this just contradicts the final sentence, which said scrupulously honest people are never effective politicians. We had scrupulously honest → not effective This is telling us "Trigger is true, outcome is false" by saying they are scrupulously honest but they ARE effective.

    Skill tested: Must be False · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    83% picked this

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