Question Type:
Principle-Strengthen (which principle most justifies the argument)
Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: NP shouldn't have gotten the WJ Award for criticism for his reviews of cars.
Evidence: Paulsen's reviews weren't criticism. Cars are utilitarian things, not works of arts. And if you're not art, you can't reveal important truths about your culture.
Answer Anticipation:
If we establish that Paulsen's reviews don't count as criticism, then we'll justify that Paulsen shouldn't have gotten this WJ criticism award. We need a rule that takes what we know about Paulsen's reviews and tells us, "THAT's not criticism." We know that Paulsen's reviews were about utiliarian things, not works of art, and thus they can't reveal truths about our culture. We could prephrase "If something is about utilitarian things or if something doesn't reveal important cultural truths, then it doesn't count as criticism".
Correct Answer:
B
Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) We can't establish that NP tried to portray cars as works of art, so we can't use this rule.
(B) Yes! This says "if an object doesn't reveal important cultural truths, then reviews of that object can't be considered criticism."
(C) Almost, but we can't establish whether NP wrote the review "for the purpose of" revealing important truths. We only know that "cars do not reveal important truths", but who knows if NP was aware of that in her intent while writing these reviews.
(D) We can't establish whether NP considers herself a critic.
(E) This is the illegal negation of what we want. We want "DOESN'T reveal important truth, DOESN'T cound as criticism", and this gives us a negated version of that.
Takeaway/Pattern: Often, these questions have some worthless answers that don't present a rule that gives us the right side we need. Here, only (E) had that flaw. The other four would take us somewhere useful, but we can only trigger (B) based on the facts we know.
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