Q5 - The railway authority inspector

[Laura Damone]

Question Type:
Match the Reasoning

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: We should be suspicious of the newspaper reporter's claim that the tracks are in poor condition.

Premises: The railway authority inspector who recently thoroughly checked the tracks testified that they were in good condition. The inspector has no bias in the matter.

Answer Anticipation:
No obvious flaws in this reasoning. It appeals to authority, but the authority is approriate, unbiased, and made their assessment both thoroughly and recently. From that we conclude that we should be skeptical of a claim that contradicts our unbiased, thorough, recent inspection.

Correct answer:
B

Answer choice analysis:
(A) This has the appeal to authority, but it doesn't conclude that we should be skeptical of a claim that contradicts the authority. Eliminate.

(B) Looks like a match! We appeal to an unbiased, appropriate authority who did a careful inspection. From that we conclude that we should be skeptical of a claim that contradicts the authority.

(C) This appeals to an authority, but doesn't conclude that we should be skeptical of a competing claim. Eliminate.

(D) This one also doesn't conclude that we should be skeptical of a competing claim, and it includes some extra fluff about bias that isn't reflected in our stimulus.

(E) This one discounts the claim of a biased authority, instead of citing the claim of an unbiased authority to counter a claim made by someone else. Eliminate!

Takeaway/Pattern:
When a Match the Reasoning question isn't well-suited to conditional logic diagramming, a great efficiency technique can be to look for conclusions mismatches first! If you're quick at spotting conclusions, you can knock this long question out really quickly because all four wrong answers have a mismatched conclusion.

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