Urk2447 wrote:I was just wondering is there a more distinct way to determine when reading a logical reasoning question, whether you would use the sufficient and necessary formula as in conditional reasoning problems, or other question types. I have a hard time determine the question type because all of the language seems so similar. Also, I found the must be true questions to be similar to the conditional reasoning ones and tried to use the sufficient and necessary formula for those ones as well. Is this wrong, or is there a better way of identifying what you are supposed to do before reading the answer choices?
Hello Urk2447,
That's a good question. --Technically, you might be able to turn almost any stimulus into a sufficient-and-necessary one of sorts: if the stimulus for a Must Be True question says, "There are three people in the waiting room named Fred, Jerry, and Ethel", you could make that a sort of conditional, "If there are people in this waiting room, there are three of them and they are named Fred, Jerry, and Ethel". However, instead of trying to make conditionals out of nothing, try to see if there is an important conditional relationship there in the stimulus.
Some of the obvious indicators, of course, are the words "if" and "then", or "sufficient" and "necessary". However, even if those words are missing, a careful reading of the stimulus should let you see if what they are asking is basically an "If...then", or "A only when B", etc., type of question.
Must Be True questions often have a bunch of facts jumbled up without a conclusion, and without any real conditional-reasoning type of relationship between or among the various sentences or terms at issue. So, once more, a careful reading should help you distinguish a Must Be True situation from a sufficient-and-necessary situation.
Hope this helps,
David
