- Fri Nov 13, 2020 5:13 pm
#81125
Scott,
For prephrasing purposes, I would treat these like any other Must Be True question. For one thing, if the answer is something that Must Be True, then my prephrase should be a pretty good one! And if the answer is something that is merely strongly supported, and not quite something that must be true, that's still not a problem - no wrong answer could match my prephrase, so if something matches my prephrase pretty closely, that's a good indication that answer should be a Contender and get some extra attention.
I don't think it makes sense to prephrase something intentionally weaker than what must be true, just to account for that fact that Most Strongly Supported answer choices might be weaker. Instead, stake out a strong prephrase, and consider whether an answer's departure from your prephrased position is enough to make the answer a Loser.
I think that for MSS answer choices, a good thing to which to pay special attention is the "certainty" language in the answer choices. If the stimulus gives me a situation where something happens once, answers like "It can happen that..." are pretty safe, whereas answers like "It is likely that..." are probably unsafe, since they go too far. It's always important to make sure the degree of certainty of the answer choice does not exceed that of the stimulus, but it seems like it comes up especially often for these! So incorporate the right "certainty" or quantitative words in your prephrase and you should see a good match.
Robert Carroll
