Logical Reasoning

PT110 · S3 · Q26 The media now devote more

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The media now devote more coverage to crime than they did ten years ago.

Conclusion

Nowadays vs. ten years ago, the media devote more coverage to crime because the public has become more interested in reading and hearing about crime (not because there is more crime).

Evidence (after all)

The media crucially relies on the interests of their audiences when making decisions about how much coverage goes to which issues.

Evaluate

Whenever we do Main Conclusion and Role, we anticipate that we'll (probably) see the Main Conclusion earlier than the Support. The last claim on over 80% of Role questions is playing some Supporting role (either as a premise or as an intermediate conclusion).

The Support indicator after all (FABS = for, after all, because, since) instructs us that the final claim is supporting the claim before it.

The first fact in this paragraph has the classic asymmetric comparison feel of a Curious Fact: why does the media devote more coverage to crime nowadays?

That provides us with a vocabulary for describing this argument in words other than Premise / Conclusion. We can think of the first sentence as the puzzling background phenomenon. The second sentence rules out one possible explanation (it's not that the crime rate went up) before pivoting into her chosen explanation (it's that people increasingly lust for crime coverage).

Note: the word "because" is being used in the causal sense there, not the reasoning sense of providing a supporting idea.

Goal

They're asking us about the Main Conclusion, aka the author's preferred explanation for the curious fact in the first sentence.

This is the author's hypothesis. She supports the plausibility of her hypothesis in the last sentence.

26.

The proposition that the public is now more interested in reading and hearing about crime plays which one of the following roles in the argument?

  1. It supports the conclusion that

    Wrong Role

    We should bail four words in. It doesn't support the conclusion; it is the conclusion.

    16% picked this

  2. It is presented as evidence

    Wrong Role

    We should bail five words in. It isn't evidence. It's the conclusion. Evidence was offered for it, in the final sentence.

    19% picked this

  3. It is a counterexample to

    Wrong Role

    We should bail four words in. It's not a counterexample. It's the conclusion. It's the author's hypothesis.

    1% picked this

  4. It is a generalization based

    Weak Conclusion/Evidence Match

    The easier way to eliminate this is that this claim (media coverage of crime has risen because public interest in crime has risen) is based primarily on the final sentence, not the first sentence, as this answer choice says. It's also questionable whether we could call this a generalization. It's talking about a specific cause/effect relationship that occurred over the past 10 years.

    1% picked this

  5. Correct

    It is offered as an

    Why this is right

    The author presented the Curious Fact: how come the media devote increasingly more coverage to crime? The author eschews one possible explanation: This is not because the crime rate has increased The author endorses, as her conclusion, an alternative explanation: (it's) because the public is now more interested in reading and hearing about crime. She supports her conclusion/ alternative explanation with the final sentence: Media mostly decide what to cover based on audience interest. LSAC is being a bit cheeky calling the author's explanation an alternative explanation, but in the chronological sequence of the argument, an initial explanation had already been raised, so it's fair game to call the second explanation considered an alternative explanation.

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

    64% picked this

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