- Fri Apr 01, 2016 4:32 pm
#22713
erickse,
In order to avoid Shell Game wrong answers, pay careful attention to the specific language used in the answer choice. When a word is changed, ask yourself whether that change matters - does it affect the validity of the answer choice? If an answer choice for a Must Be True question says almost exactly what you saw in the stimulus, but it changes "possibly" to "probably", it's made a relevant change that will affect the meaning. The testmakers are expecting you either to miss that change (when you read quickly, it can be easy to read "possibly" when the word is actually "probably", especially if the rest of the answer looks so similar to your prephrase that you get a bit careless) or to believe the two words mean the same thing. Either way, you'll fail to notice that the answer choice does not adequately answer the question given.
You asked about doing this under time constraints, and I'll give further advice relevant to that. If you could afford to spend 5 minutes reading each and every answer, you would certainly have time to check carefully every single word and make sure it matched. Because you don't have that kind of time, you want to look out for the kinds of words that a Shell Game answer will change to make an apparently correct answer actually incorrect. As I hinted at above, words like "possibly" that express the degree of certainty of something are important. Words involving time are also classic Shell Game situations - information in the stimulus may refer to the past and leave the future open to question, and an answer choice (for a Must Be True question) that makes a concrete statement about the future is likely to go beyond the facts of the stimulus. Quantity expressions ("some" and "none" and related words) are quite often used on the test - and misused in Shell Game answers!
The point of the preceding paragraph is that certain categories of words and concepts are involved in many Shell Game wrong answer choices, so, with experience, you'll get a sense of which types of words are especially likely to be changed. This will allow you to focus on making sure there is a match between what you want in an answer choice and what the answer choice as given actually says. Although, of course, the entire answer must match, because there are common elements that the testmakers put in Shell Game wrong answer choices, an evaluation that focuses special attention on words like "possibly" will be a more efficient way to guard against those wrong answer choices.
Keep in mind that the list above was not exhaustive - there are other types of words where a subtle difference in phrasing can lead to a substantial change in meaning. You'll notice these other types as you do more practice. It's good to review what you got wrong so that you can be on guard against that particular kind of mistake in the future, if you select a Shell Game wrong answer choice. Even if you get an answer right, if a particular answer that you called a Loser looks like a Shell Game trap that you avoided, reviewing the question will make sure you continue to avoid that kind of trap in the future. You can say, "I know how they tried to trick me here, and I will be on the lookout for that in the future."
Robert Carroll
