Q10 - Researcher: Overhearing only one side of

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Inference (most strongly supported)

Stimulus Breakdown:
Overhearing someone on a cell phone call is distracting. The person is speaking abnormally loudly and you're trying to guess what the other person on the call is saying.

Answer Anticipation:
We're reading to see which claims could be combined (usually with CONDITIONAL, CAUSAL, QUANTITATIVE, or COMPARATIVE language).

This one feels CAUSAL (overhearing DIVERTS attention … hearing half the conversation LEAVES us guessing … attention is diverted BECAUSE the cell-phone talker is loud).

These causes don't chain together, so we'll just anticipate some same restatement of the causal effects. (Could say "overhearing only one side of a call diverts attention for more than one reason". Could do a "if it were a NORMAL VOLUME or you heard BOTH SIDES, then you WOULDN'T have your attention diverted". This type of seemingly illegal negation is fair game when you're talking about causal factors and tasked with the looseness of 'most supported'.)

Correct Answer:
B

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) We never talked about drivers / accidents. We might accept the common sense bridge of "if your attention is diverted from driving, you're at more risk of causing an accident", but this answer talks about THE PERSON ON THE PHONE having her attention diverted. The facts were about the EAVESDROPPER having his attention diverted.

(B) Okay! This is like (A), but the driver is the EAVESDROPPER, and the driver's performance is lessened (her attention is diverted).

(C) We know nothing about traditional telephones. This is a fake opposite. They said "overhearing one side of a CELL-PHONE call DOES divert attention", and so they trot out the classic Fake Opposite answer (this shows up in Necessary Assumption a ton), which says "overhearing one side of a NOT-CELL-PHONE call DOES NOT divert attention. Because of the final sentence, that says cell-phone talkers are abnormally loud (which diverts our attention), we could say that overhearing one-side of a traditional phone call diverst our attention LESS. But even on a traditional call, we'd still have our attention diverted by only hearing half the conversation.

(D) TOO STRONG. "Inevitably"?

(E) TOO STRONG / NEW COMPARISON. Cell phones 'require' making 'more guesses'?

Takeaway/Pattern: The information involved causal relationships and the correct answer applies this causal relationship to a specific scenario. It's not a bulletproof answer, but it's a "most strongly support" question stem, so we accept some looseness.

#officialexplanation

[laurenvarg]

This correct answer really bothered me for two reasons here:

1) There is a fairly big jump between attention being diverted and PERFORMANCE being impacted.
2) Just because the drive overheard the convo, it could have been on speaker. (There's no indication in the correct response that this was one side of the conversation). The speaking loudly part was triggered, though, so it's not a deal breaker. But point number 1 still really threw me off.

I had it down to B and D, and eventually went with B because "inevitably" is just too strong of language but really, this question leaves just a little too much room for assumptions (even for a most strongly supported ?). Sloppy IMO.

[DanielZ772]

I concur with the above. The jump from attention to performance was too much for me.

Moreover, I rationalized that "diverts attention" is synonymous in meaning to "lose track of thoughts." With no qualifying language, inevitability seemed less of a jump to me than "attention" to "performance." I guess I need to re-evaluate how I understand claims of inevitability on the test.

Here is my question: if a stimulus does not admit any reason to doubt its claims, and the logic involved is valid, is this not enough for us to understand inevitability? I am schooled to think that given "If P the Q," and "P" then we can conclude not just "Q,"but "INEVITABLY Q."

In a stimulus like the above where we are given a valid chain of inferences and are assuming the truth of premises, must the concept of inevitability be introduced explicitly for me to chose an answer like "D?"

[NoahS986]

To me, this sort of question encapsulates the shift in difficulty of LR over the past few years. More are being crafted that leave the test taker to make large assumptions that, in my experience, really haven't been incorporated into LR in year's past. It's a little unfortunate.

[ChaimL393]

The key to reaching the correct answer here, as I see it, is by focusing on what makes (D) wrong. Once this is clear, the most strongly supported answer-choice is (B), despite the assumptions regarding the relationship between attention and driving performance. Simply put, (D) is wrong because losing track of your thoughts is not synonymous with having your attention diverted. To lose track of your thoughts is to forget where you were going with a train of thought. It implies a sequence, wherein one begins with an understanding of a thought process, yet ends up with lack of understanding of that thought process. Having your attention diverted does not imply that you will "inevitably" lose track of your thoughts, if thinking was the activity you were engaged in. The stimulus says nothing about losing track of your thoughts. It only talks about attention being diverted. So, there is no support for (D).

[laurenvarg]

I don't think that what makes D wrong is the sequential nature at all. If we're willing to accept the gap between diverted attention and performance, we certainly could excuse losing track of thought as a byproduct of diverted attention. The real issue here is the strength of the answer. INEVITABLY? that's far too extreme. But performance being impacted, that's just soft enough to be supported.

Still the main issue stands, can we really say that diverted attention = impacted performance? A bit sloppy but for "most strongly supported" we can let it slide.


My $0.02.

The key to reaching the correct answer here, as I see it, is by focusing on what makes (D) wrong. Once this is clear, the most strongly supported answer-choice is (B), despite the assumptions regarding the relationship between attention and driving performance. Simply put, (D) is wrong because losing track of your thoughts is not synonymous with having your attention diverted. To lose track of your thoughts is to forget where you were going with a train of thought. It implies a sequence, wherein one begins with an understanding of a thought process, yet ends up with lack of understanding of that thought process. Having your attention diverted does not imply that you will "inevitably" lose track of your thoughts, if thinking was the activity you were engaged in. The stimulus says nothing about losing track of your thoughts. It only talks about attention being diverted. So, there is no support for (D).

[christine.defenbaugh]

A lot of great discussion going on!

I think you're both right, laurenvarg and ChaimL393 - the problem with (D) is really in the combination of 'inevitably' and 'lost track of thoughts'. As DanielZ772 points out, if the stimulus of an inference question establishes that something will occur, then it absolutely establishes that will inevitably occur.

So, if the answer had said "...inevitably have their attention diverted," then it would be awesome. The problem, from that perspective, is that the inevitable thing that (D) claims is not what the stimulus established. "Attention diverted" is not the same as "lose track of thoughts" - the latter is more extreme, where I actually forgot where I was in my thought process. I can be fairly distracted (attention diverted) and still not lose track of what I'm thinking about - it just gets more difficult.

From the other side, if the answer had said "...could lose track of their thoughts," then it would be a lot more acceptable (though still a bit weird). It seems entirely possible that, when distracted, one might lose track of one's thoughts, but there's no guarantee of that.

For (B), while I get that 'driver's performance' feels like a bridge too far, it's just a stand in for 'thing someone is doing'. All we have to accept is that it's reasonable to think that when someone is distracted (attention diverted), that whatever they are doing is going to be impacted in some way. If we boil down (B) and (D) it's essentially:

(B) When you're distracted, the thing you're doing (driving) is going to suffer somewhat.
(D) When you're distracted, you will definitely fail at the thing you're doing (thinking).