#15 - Mystery stories often feature a brilliant detective

[Adeline]

Hi!

I have a question regarding the conclusion of the stimulus.
I thought what the author tries to say is that including the dull companion gives readers a chance to solve the mystery while also diverting them from the correct solution, which means that the readers have a chance to solve but are also diverted so they cannot reach the correct conclusion. and that's why I did not choose C because I thought readers cannot reach the correct solution based on the conclusion in the stimulus.

Could you help me with this?
Thank you!

[James Finch]

Hi Adeline,

It sounds like you misread what "diverted" means. It doesn't necessarily mean that the technique actually fooled anyone, just that it was intended to do so. If the readers were as clever the detective, they could also correctly solve the mystery in spite of the dimwitted sidekick's theories. Thus some stories would have to present enough clues to the reader to actually be able to solve the mystery correctly; this is necessary for the conclusion to be true, and we need to treat everything in the stimulus as true, even the conclusion.

Hope this clears things up!

[Adeline]

Hi James, thanks for your explanation

[CJ12345:]

hi, powerscore
The stimulus's focus was on how some mystery stories gives clue but readers are often diverted from it as the author purposefully introduce dull companion. Thus, my attention was fixed upon these statements. However, answer choice C was actually about readers having the potential to get the correct solution. When the AC is very subtle and out of our prephrase, is there any way to spot it more quickly rather than ignore it when AC seems irrelevant or wrong at first glance?

[Jeff Wren]

Hi CJ,

While prephrasing is definitely a helpful strategy in general, there will be times when none of the answers matches your prephrase and that's okay. It doesn't necessarily mean that your prephrase is wrong; the correct answer may just focus on a different part or aspect of the stimulus.

Just because an answer doesn't match your prephrase isn't enough to rule that answer out.

When solving a Must Be True question, you want to compare each answer to the information in the stimulus to check whether that answer is supported by the information above. (Most Strongly Supported questions are just a subcategory of Must Be True questions in which the answer doesn't necessarily have to be 100% true, but is still supported by the information in the stimulus and is solved in a similar way.)

For these questions, be wary of strongly worded answers like "most" in Answer A and "rarely" in Answer D. These answers are exaggerated and are a trap.

Answer C, which uses the word "some," is much more modest/reasonable and the kind of answer that is easier to support (and more likely to be correct).

When looking for the support for Answer C in the stimulus, the statement that the author's strategy "gives readers a chance to solve the mystery" provides the support. If none of the mystery stories gave readers enough clues to solve the mystery, then they would have zero chance to solve it.