Logical Reasoning

PT145 · S2 · Q13 Nations that have little interaction

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Nations that have little interaction with one another have little knowledge of one another’s needs and problems.

Setup

If two nations have little interaction with each other, then they have little knowledge of another's needs and problems.

Sympathy and justice depend largely on understanding the needs and problems of others.

In other words, if you don't understand the needs and problems of others, it will be hard to achieve sympathy or justice with them.

Anticipate / Goal

We know that the fill in the blank is going to synthesize multiple ideas. There are only two ideas here, so we have to figure out what we get by combining them.

Usually the key to synthesis is that two claims have some overlapping idea: in this case, the overlapping concept is knowledge/understanding of another's needs and problems.

We can imagine these ideas chaining together to give us something like this sort of chain: if two nations don't interact much, then won't understand other's needs / problems, and so sympathy / justice will be difficult.

If we wanted to pretend this was a true conditional, it would look something like this: little → little understanding → no sympathy interaction of needs / problems or justice

In that case, a contrapositive chain would sound like: Sympathy and justice require understanding each other's needs/problems, which requires interacting a lot with each other.

13.

Which one of the following most logically completes the argument?

  1. nations that have knowledge of

    Illegal Opposite

    We were told if you don't have knowledge, won't have sympathy / justice And this is saying if you do have knowledge, you will have sympathy / justice (This answer should raise a red flag since it doesn't involve the first sentence at all)

    9% picked this

  2. Correct

    without some interaction, nations are

    Why this is right

    This just connects the 1st to the 3rd in our causal chain: -don't interact -won't understand each other's needs/problems -won't have sympathy or justice

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

    86% picked this

  3. almost all problems between nations

    Too Strong: almost all

    We can't quantify in any way what percentage of problems stem from lack of sympathy and justice.

    0% picked this

  4. there is no way to

    Too Strong

    Too Strong: no way Out of Scope: conflict Whoa, where's this extreme fatalism coming from? We can't derive utter hopelessness from these two sentences. Also, who said anything about conflict between nations? For all we know, if nations just tried to interact with each other more, they might understand more about each other, might have more sympathy for each other or desire justice between each other, and be less likely to have conflict.

    0% picked this

  5. only nations that have some

    Too Strong: only Doesn't Synthesize

    In terms of matching the first sentence as a pseudo-conditional, this is putting the ideas on the correct side of the if/then. But the wording is more harsh than that of the first sentence. This says, if zero interaction, then zero knowledge of each other's needs and problems. if some knowledge, then some interaction. The passage gave us something a little fuzzier if little interaction, then little knowledge. Beyond that mismatch, we would not like this answer because of the fact that it doesn't use the 2nd idea at all. The blank we're trying to fill in is a specific consequence of the 2nd idea, so we definitely need to use the 2nd idea in this correct answer. It wouldn't be a correct answer if we just reiterated what we were told in the 1st idea. For example, it would be as crazy as this sounds: Sally hates beer. Because John only is serving beer at this party, it follows that beer is hated by Sally.

    5% picked this

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