Predicting answers for strengthen/weaken questions

[pacer]

Predicting answers for strengthen/weaken questions

I find that if I directly jump into reading the answer choices, I often get confused due to the subtle differences in wordings of each answer choice. I am trying to predict what an answer should look like in general before I read the answer choices. I am having some trouble with predicting answers for strengthen/weaken questions after I have established the argument presented in the stimulus.

For example,

After reading a stimulus that argues that X is a better business strategy, if I think what would strengthen this? I always can only come up with "evidence that shows that X has led to better outcome". And vice versa for weaken questions.

Can you please offer some tips or advise on how I can go about formulating a general idea of the answers before looking at the choices. I feel that what I am doing is very basic, too general/broad, and repetitive for every strengthen/weaken question.

Thanks

[Andrew Ash]

Hi Pacer,

Thanks for your post, and for asking a question that's going to be relevant to so many students.

Whenever you're trying to strengthen or weaken an argument, what you want to focus on is the connection between the premises and the conclusion. These arguments are always going to have some kind of problem, which means there will be some kind of gap where the premises don't necessarily lead to the conclusion. The key is to identify what that problem is, and then either fix it (for Strengthen) or make it worse (for Weaken).

Let's look at a simple argument as an example: "My friend is a great tennis player. After all, he just won the local tournament."

This argument isn't perfect because we don't know how difficult the local tournament was. There are lots of reasons why it could have been easy - maybe our friend was the only entrant, maybe the other competitors were all injured, and so on - but as long as we recognize that the premise doesn't guarantee the conclusion, we're in good shape.

You don't need to know exactly what the correct answer choice is going to say. As we saw in the example, there would be lots of possible correct answers, so there's no way to come up with a word-for-word prephrase. The key is that you need to know exactly what the right answer is going to do - either hurt the connection between the premises and the conclusion, or strengthen it. Once you know that, you'll be ready to attack the answer choices.

I hope this helps!

Thanks,
Andrew

[pacer]

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the quick reply.

I will keep what you stated in mind as I work through more LR practice.

Can I use the same general technique for the RC section strengthen/weaken questions?

i.e. try to figure out how the premise and evidence presented in the passage leads to (strengthen) or does not lead to (weaken) the author's main point. But in this case, I am thinking that there could be multiple premises/evidence given given in a passage that has ultimately led to the main point, so there could be different answers possible.

Pacer

[Andrew Ash]

Hi Pacer,

Yes, it does work the same way in Reading Comprehension!

Usually Reading Comprehension Strengthen/Weaken questions will tackle a small, specific argument that's only in one paragraph, not the main point, so you can use a similar strategy.

The structure of the argument can be a little trickier to spot in Reading Comprehension because you have to pull it out of the passage as a whole, but once you've done that, it works exactly the same way: find the gap between the premises and the conclusion, and then pick the answer choice that makes that gap bigger or smaller.

Best,
Andrew