#10 - People often admonish us to learn the lessons of

[misheleleee]

Hi! I got this wrong by choosing B over D. I interpreted the stimulus as follows:

The statement in question says: "People say we should learn lessons from history."

Author's conclusion: "It is nearly impossible to learn lessons from history." I think my mistake was in this step because I didn't consider the stuff about lessons being not very applicable to be part of the conclusion. I thought that was just more supporting information.

I interpreted the statement in question to be neutral to the conclusion because it was just saying that people recommend we learn from history. Going off of this, you can accept the conclusion that learning from history is impossible, or deny the conclusion, so learning from history is possible.

I didn't interpret the author's conclusion to say that we should not learn from history.

How can I avoid this mistake in the future?

[Amber Thomas]

Hi misheleleee!

Let's start by breaking down our stimulus:

Premise 1: People say we should learn the lessons of history.
Premise 2: Even if we could figure out what the past was really like, it is still nearly impossible to discover its lessons.
Premise 3: For example, we are supposed to learn lessons from WWI, but what are those lessons?
Premise 4: Even if we could discover what said lessons are, we may not ever be able to apply them, as the exact same circumstances won't ever occur again.

So, this is what our author says regarding the lessons of history: a) it is nearly impossible to discover these lessons, b) even if we could discover them, we could never apply them. So, it logically follows that our author does not think learning the lessons of history is worthwhile, since his whole argument is dedicated to giving reasons as to why this pursuit is difficult and/or inapplicable.

Answer Choice B states: " It is compatible with accepting the argument’s conclusion and with denying it."

Our author's conclusion states that "it is nearly impossible to discover [the past's] lessons." This is not compatible with the idea that we should learn the lessons of history figures, as our argument outright states that this pursuit is impossible.

I hope this helps!