Logical Reasoning

PT7 · S1 · Q9 The commercial news media emphasize exceptional

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The commercial news media emphasize exceptional events such as airplane crashes at the expense of those such as automobile accidents, which occur far more frequently and represent a far greater risk to the public.

Facts

The media emphasizes exceptional events like plane crashes at the expense of things like car crashes that are more frequent and riskier to the public.

Yet the public tends to interpret the degree of emphasis the news media give to these occurrences as indicating the degree of risk they represent.

Evaluate / Goal

"Degree of emphasis" and "risk" show up in both statements, so try to connect them to derive a prediction. What do we know about degree of emphasis? The public thinks it reflects the degree of risk, but the media gives a greater degree of emphasis to rare (exceptional), less risky things like plane crashes, than to things that pose a greater risk, like car crashes. So it sounds like the media is giving the public a false impression of the risks posed by each type of accident by overemphasizing plane crashes and underemphasizing car crashes.

9.

If the statements above are true, which one of the following conclusions is most strongly supported by them?

  1. Print media, such as newspapers

    Unsupported Comparison

    We don't have info to support a comparison between different flavors of commercial media. It's always dealt with as an entire category in the stimulus.

    0% picked this

  2. The emphasis given in the

    Unsupported Causal Relationship

    Tempting, because that's probably the "In Real Life" explanation for this phenomenon. But nothing in the stimulus suggests this causal relationship, and we have to stick to the text.

    5% picked this

  3. Events over which people feel

    Unsupported Comparison

    We don't have any info to support a comparison between events within vs. outside our control. Common sense tells us that we have more control over our vehicles than we do over airplanes, but car crashes are still outside of our control to some degree. And the perception of danger (aka risk) is only attributed to the degree of media coverage in the stimulus, so it isn't well supported to attribute risk to something else (our perception of our degree of control of over the situation).

    7% picked this

  4. Correct

    Where commercial news media constitute

    Why this is right

    This one is tricky because it posits a conditional relationship (where there is X, there is Y), and the last part of the answers reads very strong (does not reflect). But we predicted that the two statements in the stimulus could be connected to derive that commercial media was giving the public a mistaken impression of the risk posed by car vs. plane crashes, so it stands to reason that if that's the dominant form of media, the public perception of risk, at least vis a vis this one thing, doesn't reflect the actual risk posed. Remember, ruling out language like "does not reflect" isn't actually strong. It has a very low burden of proof. All we need to support a claim that X doesn't reflect Y is a single instance in which X and Y don't match up.

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

    85% picked this

  5. A massive outbreak of cholera

    Unsupported Comparison

    This one starts out strong: a massive cholera outbreak sounds like an exceptional event, which we'd expect to get more media coverage than a more common event, even if the more common one is actually riskier. That would be a well supported application of the principle in the stimulus. But a rarer but less serious disease isn't a good match for "common but riskier": in fact, it's pretty much the opposite. Strong start but poor finish is a classic LSAT trap!

    4% picked this

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