Logical Reasoning

PT105 · S4 · Q6 Willett: Lopez and Simmons, a

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Willett: Lopez and Simmons, a married couple, have both been offered jobs at Evritech Corporation.

Conclusion

Their decision to reveal their marriage is foolish.

Intermediate Conclusion (since)

It will mean that one of them has a job offer withdrawn.

Evidence (after all)

Evritech has a rule against hiring more than one member of the same family.

They could easily keep their marriage secret initially and then later informing Evritech that they got married; there's no policy of terminating one of two employees who marry each other.

Evaluate

Whenever we read Main Conclusion or Role, we look for "upside down arguments", where the conclusion happens before the supporting the evidence, since more than 80% of the arguments on these two question types are structured that way.

In particular, ~65% are a Pivot / Rebuttal claim ~25% are the First Sentence

The first sentence is factual. The second sentence describes someone else's idea or action (they decided to reveal their marriage). Usually, this would be followed by a Pivot + Pushback, and that's exactly what we get when we see, "Their decision is foolish, however".

We would immediately suspect that this claim is the conclusion, and only need verification that it gets supported.

It does. The following clause starts with SINCE, which means we're supporting the 'foolish' claim.

Goal

We just want to find a match for . You could potentially reword that as, "They shouldn't reveal their marriage" or something like that.

6.

The main conclusion of Willett's argument is that

  1. Lopez and Simmons should not

    Bad Match (applied vs. reveal marriage)

    The conclusion is about whether they should have revealed their marriage, not about whether they should have applied for the job.

    0% picked this

  2. Evritech Corporation's rule against hiring

    Unrelated to Goal / Unstated

    This doesn't look anything like "Lopez and Simmons were foolish to reveal their marriage to Evritech", so we can stop reading at a glance. Even worse, this makes a totally unsupported claim.

    1% picked this

  3. Correct

    Lopez and Simmons would be

    Why this is right

    "Unwise" is a good match for "foolish". So this starts by saying, "It would be foolish for them to reveal their marriage to Evritech", which is exactly what we were looking for. It goes on to add something else: until they've already started to work there. That definitely goes a little farther than the explicit conclusion, but it does faithfully represent what the author ends up meaning by the conclusion. He's saying, "It's dumb to reveal it now (it makes more sense to reveal it after you have the job)."

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

    90% picked this

  4. Evritech Corporation should be willing

    Unrelated to Goal / Unstated

    This doesn't look anything like "Lopez and Simmons were foolish to reveal their marriage to Evritech", so we can stop reading at a glance. This claim never appeared in the paragraph, and we wouldn't be able to infer it, but more importantly our job here isn't to infer; it's to match an answer to the actual explicit conclusion.

    1% picked this

  5. Evritech Corporation is not likely

    Assumption Bait

    This doesn't say "they are foolish to reveal their marriage." It says, "Evritech probably won't find out, if they don't reveal". That's a very different claim. This claim was never made, but it is close to something the author is assuming, so it might "feel true". That's not our task. We're not looking for things the author would likely believe. We're looking to match the explicit conclusion that the author spoke in the stimulus.

    7% picked this

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