Q23 - Fine short story writers are unlikely to become

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Match the Reasoning

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: Most good short story writers wouldn't be good novelists.
Evidence: Good short story writing involves weaving together small details. Good novel writing involves focusing on larger matters. And only a few writers are good at both.

Answer Anticipation:
We could potentially try to clean this up symbolically and think about it like this:
C: People who are A are usually not gonna be B.
P1: A requires X.
P2: B requires Y.
P3: Almost no one is both X and Y.

Correct Answer:
E

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) I would stop reading after "NEVER", since the original conclusion was only proving "likely".

(B) There's only one premise, so I wouldn't bother reading it unless all the others faile.

(C) The "cannot" would turn me off for the same reason I bailed from (A).

(D) Maybe. It's not awful, but it's got some disparities -- there's no match for the "few people have both" premise. And the conclusion is about "most people", whereas the original was "most people who are A are unlikely to be B".

(E) YES, this works. Conclusion is same strength and matches the form of "ppl who are A are unlikely to be B". Here, they really synthesized the three premises into one sentence, but this dense sentence lays out the same three component parts: A requires X, B requires Y, and few people are both X and Y.

Takeaway/Pattern: I haven't seen a correct answer (in a recent memory, at least) that works this way. If you use the "count the number of premises" shortcut to make some of your eliminations, this could fool you. However, the one premise in (E) is WAY denser than the one premise in (B), which I quickly abandoned hope in without fully reading. I tried to model what my quickest reasons for bailing/eliminating would be, since the skillset we're trying to develop for Matching questions involves a little bit of gambling on hunches so that we're not making ourselves spend 2+ minutes reading all five answer choice arguments start to finish.

#officialexplanation