Q20 - Critic: The more a novel appeals to the general

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Sufficient Assumption

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: No serious novelist is primarily motivated by desire for money.

Evidence: All serious novelists care about literary style. Also, the more a novel appeal to the public, the more money the author will make from it.

Answer Anticipation:
That first sentence feels barely relevant, although because it and the conclusion are both talking about money, we'll have to make it relevant. We're trying to prove that "if you're a serious novelist, then your primary desire is not money".

What do we know about serious novelists? We know that they all care about literary style. We could have a correct answer that just says, "If you care about literary style, then you don't primarily care about money".

But if we want to make that first sentence 'useful', then we might anticipate an answer like, "If you care about literary style, then your novel won't appeal very much to general public (so it won't make much money, so they apparently don't care about money)". I doubt that would be the answer, though, since we'd be adding a weird connective layer that if it DOESN'T make money then it wasn't MOTIVATED by a desire to make money.

Correct Answer:
B

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) This would allow us to infer that novels written by serious novelists won't in fact make much money, but it doesn't help us get at the language we need, which is whether the novelists were motivated to make money.

(B) YES, looks good. This says "if a novelist cares about lit style, then they are not primarily motivated by desire for money". We know all serious novelists care about lit style, so now we know that they all are not primarily motivated by desire for money.

(C) "GOOD literary style" is out of scope. We know serious novelists cares about literary style. We don't know whether they exhibit good literary style.

(D) The contrapositive would read, "If a writer's novels don't appeal to the general public, then they aren't primarily motivated by the desire to make money". We have no idea if the novels of serious novelists appeal to the general public, so we can't derive anything from this rule.

(E) Any answer that takes the form, "IF ____ , THEN the opposite of the conclusion" is useless. It can't be used to derive the conclusion.

Takeaway/Pattern: On Sufficient Assumption, if there is a new term/concept in the conclusion, it basically must be in the correct answer (super rare exceptions apply). So we know going into the answers that we need a rule that would allow us to prove someone is "NOT primarily motivated by a desire to make money". That would immediately get rid of (A) and (E). When it comes to (B), (C), and (D), we are just asking ourselves whether we know enough about serious novelists to trigger these rules: do they care about literary style? / do they exhibit good literary style? / do their novels appeal to the general public?

#officialexplanation