Question Type:
Sufficient Assumption
Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: Anyone who knows Ellsworth would suspect that he's offended by the media's suggesting he's done unethical business stuff.
Evidence: Anyone who knows Ellsworth knows he's self-righteous, bragging about how his generation is morally superior to the previous generation's greed.
Answer Anticipation:
Since there's only one Premise, one Conclusion, and both are facts about the overlapping idea "Everyone who knows Ellsworth would know/suspect _____ ", we're really just connecting the two blanks. We want to prephrase an "IF prem, THEN conc" rule. So we would want "IF someone is self-righteous and idealistic and such, THEN that person would surely be offended by being accused of being unethical."
Correct Answer:
E
Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) The conclusion isn't about whether E is actually unethical. It's about whether or not people would be surprised that he's offended.
(B) Similarly to (A), we need an rule that gets us to "no one would be surprised he's offended". This is only talking about whether he was/wasn't unethical.
(C) Again, this is useless if it doesn't help us prove "no would be surprised he's offended".
(D) Just like all the others.
(E) Yes! This allows us to prove "no would be surprised he's offended", since we know he's self-righteous and 'everyone expects self-righteous people to be easily offended'.
Takeaway/Pattern: In Sufficient Assumption, if there's a 'New Guy' in the Conclusion, we HAVE to have that in our answer choice. Here, just knowing we were trying to prove the language "no one will be surprised he's offended" would get us quickly to (E).
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