Q16 - Roxanne promised Luke that she would finish her report

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Logical Completion (Draw a Conclusion / Complete the Analogy)

Stimulus Breakdown:
Evidence: If you broke a promise to meet a friend for lunch because you were sick, it wouldn't be wrong. Your friend wouldn't expect you to still come. Roxanne promised Luke she'd finish their report on vacation, although the deadline has been postponed.
Conc: ....?

Answer Anticipation:
What the heck? How are we supposed to use this principle "you can break a promise if you're sick" in relation to Roxanne's promise to finish the report while on vacation? It doesn't seem like the deadline being postponed applies to the principle so I would set it aside mentally for the time being.

Theoretically, we could draw a conclusion that says "if something prevents Roxanne from following through on her promise, it will not be wrong for her to fail to finish the report on vacation."

Correct Answer:
D

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) To match the principle, we'd want to hear about whether Luke expects the promise to be fulfilled.

(B) Almost. This has the right "If friend didn't expect ____ , then it's not wrong for promise-maker to break promise." The mismatch is that we need the "friend didn't expect ____" to be saying "friend didn't expect promise to be kept", whereas this is saying "friend didn't expect the surprising circumstance that thwarted the promise."

(C) This doesn't match. The original was about the friend NOT expecting the promise-maker to do something.

(D) YES! This matches the reason given in the analogy: "If your friend doesn't expect you to fulfill your promise, it's not wrong to fail to keep the promise.

(E) No, we definitely don't want to say "it would be WRONG" for the promise-maker to do something.

Takeaway/Pattern: On a first read, I was expecting the test to reward us for saying "if something is out of your control, you can break a promise", which is why the deadline-extension seemed like a poor fit. It turned out that the salient quality being tested was "if your friend doesn't expect you to keep the promise anymore, then you don't have to keep the promise". Some people may have already sensed that initially. The rest of us can get this question correct anyway as long as we're trying to match the features of the answer choice up with the lunch analogy in the 2nd sentence.

#officialexplanation

[Djjustin818]

2 questions:

1) What question type is this?

2) I got this answer right but I didn't follow any kind of method. I just crossed off any answer that didn't result in "not wrong" (A, C & D) and then eliminated B because the second part, "Luke did not expect the deadline to be postponed" seemed irrelevant. I did spend a good amount of time on this question though. Is there a better/faster way to go about this question and/or question type? Thanks

[csunnerberg13]

I thought this question was really tough, as well. In the end it seemed most helpful to put the stimulus in really abstract language and then look for something that matched my "abstract-ness" in the answer choices.

So, stimulus very abstractly: R promised L she would do X, then there was a reason presented that it wasn't necessary for her to do X. Clearly, if you promised F you would do Z and a good reason was presented not to do Z, it would not be wrong to not do Z and F would not expect you to do Z. Similarly...

Anticipate what the answer is looking for: So what's missing with R and L that we had with the second analogous situation? Well we have the same scenario with a promise and a potential reason not to fulfill that promise. So now we want to match the idea that it would not be wrong to not do X and L would not expect R to do X...


Answer choices:
(A) "If Roxeanne believes..." who cares about what she believes? Eliminate.

(B) is a confusingly worded answer choice, but it depends on "if Luke did not expect the deadline to be postponed." We don't know about what happens when Luke expects or does not expect things.

(C) doesn't match our analogous situation. It says that even in the event of a good reason not to do X, L still expects it and therefore it's wrong for R not to do it. We don't know about what happens in the event that a good reason not to do something happens and the person still wants it done.

(D) matches perfectly. If Luke doesn't expect R to do X because of the good reason, then it's not wrong that R doesn't do it.

(E) concludes "it would be wrong if she did finish it." Once again, we have no reason to think that because we don't know what happens in a situation where it is wrong to do something. We're talking about an event where there is a good reason to abstain so it's not wrong to abstain.

I think my explanations could use some fine-tuning here, so any additional advice/explanation from the geeks would be very helpful...but for now I hope that helps a bit!