Q19 - Any government practice that might facilitate

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Inference (must be true)

Stimulus Breakdown:
We're reading to combine ideas, using CONDITIONAL, CAUSAL, QUANTITATIVE, or COMPARATIVE ideas.

CONDITIONAL: If a govt practice facilitates the abuse of power and there's no compelling reason to do it, it shouldn't be done.
Keeping secrets qualifies, and too often it's done for insubstantial reasons.
CONDITIONAL: When govt officials conceal that they're keeping a secret, this facilitates more abuse.

Answer Anticipation:
There are many conditional/causal claims here. It sounds like when the govt keeps a secret, it enables abuses of power. And when they conceal that secret, it enables abuses of power. And according to the first sentence, those practices should not be undertaken.

My prediction would be that they'll tie together the first and last sentence to get something like "government officials shouldn't conceal from the public that they are keeping a secret".

Correct Answer:
C

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) "Most" cases? We can't quantity that it's more than 50%.

(B) This is making a fake negation out of the rule in the first sentence.

(C) Yes, this seems fair. If there's no compelling reason, then practices that enable abuse of power shouldn't be done. "Concealing a secret" enables abuse of power. Thus it shouldn't be done.

(D) "Guilty" sounds very new, and the facts were describing "faciliating" the abuse of power / "opening up the opportunity". So there's nothing about the govt. officials themselves being the ones committing the abuse.

(E) This says "if keeping govt secrets WOULD make it easier to abuse power, then govt officials shouldn't keep secrets." This is too definitive and sweeping, because the first sentence allows for possible exceptions where you might have a compelling reason to do something that might facilitate the abuse of power.

Takeaway/Pattern: The correct answer happens to tie together ideas and details from all four sentences. We apply the conditional rule in the first sentence to the fact in the second sentence. The part about "justifiably keeping secrets" has no actual bearing on this answer choice. It's just there to make it more complicated / less appealing, I think. The conditional in the final sentence and the one in the first sentence give us an A -> B - > C chain, which Inference questions love to test and reward.

If conceal a secret -> enables abuse --> shouldn't be undertaken unless there's a compelling reason

#officialexplanation

[ImadL659]

From your post:

"(A) 'Most' cases? We can't quantity that it's more than 50%."

What about this phrase from the stimulus?

"Though government officials sometimes are justified in keeping secrets, *too often* they keep secrets for insubstantial reasons, and in so doing they wind up enabling abuses of power."

I thought often meant more than 50%.

[xingxingu229]

hello, 659,below is my thoughts about the ''too often'' in the argument.

I chose A in the test, but in my BlindReview , I figured out what's wrong with the ''most''.

In the stimulus, '' too often '' is used to describe the event that government officials keep secrets and doing that might facilitate the abuse of power. But that doesn't mean they are NOT justified in doing that. Because the first sentence told us that there were except circumstance which is a compelling reason for doing so.

Thus, I think A is wrong for saying that in most case they are NOT justified in doing so. We just know there are many event, but don't know about whether they are justified or not.

[JeffB433]

Hi Patrick,

I had a similar problem with ImadL659 interpreting (A).

In addition to "too often," the same premise states: "Though government officials are SOMETIMES justified." Doesn't this indicate that only less than 50% of officials are justified, meaning the remaining "most" (more than 50%) of them are not justified?

Or is (A) a wrong answer choice because it is referring to the "concealing of information," which seems to be different from "keeping of government secrets" in the stimulus?

Thanks in advance for your clarification!

[ohthatpatrick]

To clarify a question from several posts back,
"too often" ≠ most

I can say, "Innocent people are too often sentenced to death".
"Too often, I forget to send my Dad something for Father's Day".

Does that mean that "Most people sentenced to death are innocent"? Of course not.
Does it mean that "on most Father's Day's, I've forgotten to send something?" Nope.

"Too often" is a subjective term. It has no precise quantifiable floor, other than "at least a few times".

The reason I was so brief with eliminating on the basis of "most" is because of how specific that term is. There are only a handful of terms that equivalently imply more than 50% of cases:
majority, usually, generally, probably, tends to, typically, almost all

However, as you're noticing, there's another problem with (A) as well.

We only discuss cases in which the government officials conceal from the public the information that "they are keeping a secret".

"Sometimes" = at least once. There is no ceiling for this term. It could be higher than 50% of the time. It could be 100% of the time.

These are true statements:
"Sometimes, human babies are born on Earth."
"Sometimes, horses can gallop."

So unfortunately (A)'s lack of support is wrapped up in a technical understanding of both of these quantity terms.

I could say, "Sometimes lawyers are honest, upright people, but too often they are immoral predators." In the end, you can't quantitatively specify whether I think more/less than 50% of lawyers are immoral predators.

I think you're also correct that "concealing information" ≠ "keeping secrets", in the sense that there seems to be daylight between stuff that might be concealed to protect privacy, but still available to authorities / Freedom of Information requests.

I think the common sense understanding of "keeping secrets" has to do with things like "We plan to invade Norway at midnight .... We have alien spaceships in a lab underground in New Mexico", not stuff like "we are concealing information about who died in this plane crash until we've had a chance to privately tell the family members of the dead people".