Q21 - Although the first humans came to Australia

[jm.kahn]

I eliminated B because the conclusion of B isn't parallel to the conclusion in the stim.

Conclusion of B is definitive "two of us will be unable to repair"

Conclusion of stim is probabilistic "probably did not cause the mass extinction"

Can there be an explanation of the reasoning for this issue and why B and not C is correct?

[emil.brignola]

First time posting in here feel free to correct or add anything, but for parallel flaw questions the conclusion does not have to match up exactly the answer choice just has to contain the same flaw as the argument.

To start the conclusion is that human borne diseases probably did not cause the mass extinction...

Why?
Because more than 55 different species disappeared and no ONE disease however virulent (basically means how strong/deadly the virus is) could be fatal to that many different species.

The key here is the "no one disease", ok they might be right that no one disease could kill that many species but what about 2 or 3 different viruses combined together. The flaw here is that they are do not take into account that 2 or 3 human borne diseases combined could do it, just because one virus cant do it doesnt mean that that virus combined with others couldnt do it.

B has the same flaw, it took me a while to see it but it basically says that since one person cant fix a window and a door and the other person cant fix a window and a door too it concludes that they are going to need outside help. But it doesnt consider if one person can fix a door and the other person can fix a window then they will be able to repair their apartment without outside help . The last half of the last sentence is what got me, I read it as that neither of us is able to fix doors or windows but he says fix both doors AND windows, so saying that one person cannot fix both a window and a door.

As for C, it just really doesnt have the same flaw, I dont really have a great explanation for this, except that since all of them dont like any of the restaurants they cant combine to like one of the restaurants, basically there cant be any combined effort.

We need some more explanations up for this Test, there were a lot of assumption questions, especially for the necessary assumption questions toward the later questions. For these i felt like rather than negating the answer choice and it destroys the conclusion you negated an answer choice and it destroyed the evidence which in turn destroyed the conclusion.

[jwms]

(C) just isn't flawed, in my view. That's the main reason why it's incorrect, I think.

(C) says these three individuals would like to go for dinner, but they probably won't. Why won't they? Because there isn't a single resto in the area that they all like.

Seems pretty logical to me.


The stimulus states: human-borne diseases probably didn't cause X issue. Why? Because no single disease could have! (but we didn't say a single disease anywhere...)

(B) states: I can repair some stuff, you can repair some stuff, but we'll be unable to repair our apartment. Why? Because I can't repair Y, and you can't repair X.

But, just as in the stimulus, the door is left wide open for me to repair X and you to repair Y. There's this big elephant in the room in both the stimulus and TCR (B), where the evidence doesn't support the conclusion. The evidence is half-baked; it's seemingly intentionally ill-conceived and doesn't match up with the conclusion. In other words, the argument is utterly flawed and has a missing connection. (C), in my view, doesn't have that missing connection. There's not a real gap there.

Hope the experts correct me if I'm wrong here.

[maryadkins]

Great explanation of this problem, and of (B)! Thanks so much for it.

In (C), they don't like any of the restaurants, so they probably won't go to them. We have some assumptions (maybe they'll leave the immediate vicinity?), but as the previous poster noted, this is not the same flaw as in the stimulus: the "just because ONE can't doesn't mean they all can't" flaw.

In short, you can't rely as heavily on structural sentence aspects in Match the Flaw questions as you can in plain Matching questions. Here, (B) has the flaw even though the nature of the conclusion is distinguished by "probably."

(A) is also lacking the "just because one can't doesn't mean they all can't" flaw.

(D) exhibits a different flaw, which is that the painting could still be great art even if MOST art produced recently isn't (because that leaves room for artworks that ARE great). This is about overlapping groups, and what must overlap/won't necessarily overlap.

(E) also exhibits a different flaw, which is that maybe some people don't have a benefit, still, since we're only told that some people benefit from symptom alleviation. This is also about overlapping groups.

Hope this helps clarify.

[HughM388]

I know that in C) the people purportedly want to eat together, but that's still no reason they have to "go straight home after the show." They could very plausibly eat separately in different restaurants they do like, so the fact that a single restaurant can't satisfy all of them is not dispositive in the very same way that a single disease being incapable of taking out 55 species isn't determinative.

I suppose B) is better, but C) does reflect the same flaw, in the way I've described. The fact that the theater-goers couldn't eat dinner together is just as inconclusive as the fact that one disease isn't virulent enough to extinguish many species.