#5 - In some countries, there is a free flow of information

[kristinaroz93]

"In some countries , there is a free flow of information about infrastructure, agriculture, and industry, whereas in other countries, this information is controlled by a small elite..."

1) Though I got the question right, there are still some aspects about it that are troubling me. I looked up a good explanation online for why C was wrong other than that it says "governnment" and not "small elite" and this is what I got: "it doesn’t tell us that crises are more common than in countries where the [elite] doesn’t control such information. Maybe crises are common in both countries.".

However, I personally also feel choice B also suffers from this same inadequacy as choice C. Just because choice B says that economic crises become more frequent in general, the less information there is going out to the majority of the population, how do we know that they are likely to become MORE frequent than the occurence of crises in other countries? What if those other countries have so many economic crises happening at all times, that these elite driven governments still cant match their level regardless of how much info they withold? Maybe the term "likely" being in the conclusion has something to do with it as it lessens the degree of certainty we need to have in our answer choice (I hope my confusion is making sense here). **But I guess I can't shake the idea of the terms "more frequent" and "common" as being so different from eachother, that they are sufficient to render one choice correct and the other incorrect**. I can use some additional insight here. Sorry for how long this post is coming out to be!

2) And now onto other choices, please let me know how accurate I am in describing why I eliminated the other answers:

A) It talks about people who will suffer from economic crises specifically when the conclusion is about the country as a whole (which is obviously more broad), and it also doesn't talk about the frequency of crises in comparison to other countries.

D) Good decisions do not neccessarily equate to less crises happening. And again we miss the mark on how often crises will happen when compared to other countries.

E) My gut quickly eliminated this problem, even though I cannot concrecetely explain why it is wrong. Can anyone help here? (My thought on this is that it just doesn't mention the frequency or likelihood of crises happening at all, which is what the conclusion is talking about)

3) Is this question a justify that can be diagrammed as:
A: small elite country-->vast majority of people are denied vital information about things that determine their welfare
Conclusion (C): These countires are likely to experience more economic crises than other countries
so we have a-->b
c

and so we need b-->c, which choice B gives us.
(is this diagram correct?)


Thanks in advance=)!

[Adam Tyson]

I'll start at the end, with your diagram - it looks perfect to me, and is the roadmap to coming up with the perfect prephrase to crush the question. That prephrase would be something like "as access to info goes down, crises go up". That ought to be enough to eliminate the wrong answers here and pick the correct answer, which is B, and which is a pretty darn good match for that prephrase.

As to your analysis of answer B, I think you may be over-thinking this one. Remember how a Justify answer works - you accept it as true, and then ask yourself if it makes the conclusion perfect. The question is not WHETHER answer B is a true statement - just accept it as true, and see if the conclusion in the stimulus follows logically. So, if it is true that crises go up as access to info goes down, does that appear to prove that in countries where most people are denied access to info there will be more crises than in places where that is not the case?

One last thing - remember what the instructions say at the beginning of the section. You are not supposed to be looking for "right" answers or "perfect" answers or even "good" answers - you are supposed to be looking for the "best" answer out of the five choices you are given. Don't spend any time trying to tear down an answer if it is clearly better than the others, and don't try to come up with a way to make a lesser answer better. Prephrase, sort into losers and contenders, and pick the one that is the best of the bunch, even if you don't like it very much. Students who get into arguments with the answer choices will waste time and talk themselves out of picking the credited response, and that's not what we want you to do on your test, right?

Look at the whole problem again through the lens of "best answer of the bunch" and see if you don't find it much easier to accept answer B now.

Good luck!

[kristinaroz93]

Thank you so much that was a very clear and helpful explanation. I guess the "as info available goes down, crises goes up" tibbit is essentially our B-->C from what I understand, correct? And that is how we prove our conclusion.

However, I still would love to know why choice c was bad =)

Thanks in advance!

[Adam Tyson]

I think there are two reasons to eliminate answer C - the first is one you already addressed, and that is that "common" is not the same as "more frequent". "More" crises may still be fairly rare - three times a century instead of once, perhaps? Another reason to eliminate it is that it doesn't raise any issues about lack of access to info among the population. Gov't may control the info, but is controlling it the same as restricting access to it? When the gov't controls the info, do we know that the vast majority of the population are denied vital info? Maybe the gov't is very transparent with that info and disseminates it widely to help the citizenry? (put aside any real-world cynicism to swallow that one!) The real issue in the stimulus was not who controlled the info, but who had access to it. Lack of access, not lack of control, is what contributes to crises.

[kristinaroz93]

Alright, let me process what you wrote:

In trying to connect these two statements: if a vast majority of people in a country are denied vital information about things that determine their welfare--> These countires are likely to experience more economic crises than other countries (B-->C)

C is not really a good substitue that first statement because we do not know what is meant by gov't controllig access to information really means, maybe just becasue they are controlling it doesn't mean they are witholding it. And so our link there breaks down. Whereas B makes the link stronger because it directly states that the information is decreasing, and as the information is decreasing the economic crisis become more frequent. Essentially it gives a mroe perfect linkage there.

I guess for C we assume government controlling info causes less info to be avaialble to the public because this idea was directly stated in the premise (in the second sentence), but I see now that we needed to specifically zone in on the linkage of B-->C and kind of ignore all else, by finding answer choices with statements that are good substitues for them and link them in that exact way/manner/order.

Please let me know if I have grasped it. =)

[Adam Tyson]

You have indeed! The stimulus actually doesn't say that limited control requires limited access - it says in places where the elite control there IS limited access, but not that limited access MUST follow from limited control. You can think of control and access as two totally unrelated concepts, if that helps. Where the elite control, limited access is also the norm, but there's no claim that the former is sufficient for the latter, just that they correlate. Gov't control is not the same as small elite control, so there's no justification for assuming the same correlation.

Good work. This is the kind of bigger picture stuff that will lead to your breakthrough!

[kristinaroz93]

Thanks so much Adam!

Okay so I have looked at the problem again.

There is no causation as you said and I think my justify diagram from earlier was then incorrect in light of that.

My diagram should have just been just this without the A tibbit:
B: people denied information
concluson (C): More frequent economic crisis

and the whole time we are just trying to close the gap bwteen B-->C or in other words form a connection there.

And since we have no causation, as in we don't know that the small elite control causes the information to be witheld (and yes, I had incorrrectly previously presumed there to be causation of the two in the problem), it could just be a correlation that in any country with a small elite system that there also happens to be this limited access to information. But not that the small elite control causes this to happen, which means that just because we see the term government in the answer choice (assuming this means the small elite), that we can't automatically presume the information in that country is limited.

And so that is your reason for saying that it is not true that limited information MUST follow from elite control or govenrmentIs (because we have only correlation not causation), is all this reasoning correct so far? I am just trying to understand what you wrote better. And obv if government control doesn't automatically equate to there being less information, because we do nto know what actually causes there to be less information, our B-->C link breaks down becasue B needs to talk about the "less information" apsect of the stimulus and C needs to talk about "frequency of the crisis " occuring to make the conlcusion follow logically. Am i bulletproof yet? =)

However, what if it said in the stimulus that limited information MUST follow from elite control or govenrment (as in elite control is the cause of the info being withheld) and that small elite= gov't control , and that the term common can equate to being more frequent. Would C in that event be correct?

Thanks in adance and you have been of insurmountable help to me!

[kristinaroz93]

Anyone? =)

[Clay Cooper]

Hi Kristina,

Thanks for your follow-up. I think, in order for answer choice C to be correct, the stimulus would have to be changed in a few ways.

First, since the only information we have about the commonality of economic crises in the stimulus is that they are MORE common in countries where the population is denied information, we would need for this comparative statement (crises are 'more frequent') to be changed to an absolute statement (crises are 'common').

Second, since C talks about the government controlling such information, while the stimulus speaks only of a small elite controlling the information, we would need an explicit connection between the two for C to be correct; the stimulus would need to be changed to state that this information is controlled by 'the government' rather than a 'small elite.'

Having said all that, if I understand your question correctly, I think the answer is yes, if these two changes were made to the stimulus, answer choice C could be correct.

Thanks again for your follow-up. Keep up the hard work.

[kristinaroz93]

Hi Clay,

Thank you for responding. My biggest question actually came from eveyrthing before the very last part you answered and it was whether we can automatically equate government control with limited access (I do know we can't equate gov't control to small elite but limited access was a bit different). I gave a whole explanation on why we cannot based on posts by Adam because I had not previously realized that there was no causation in the stimulus. Do you think you could speak on my response to him in that regard because I wanted to see if I grasped what he said =)


Our convo with him on it starts from the 4th post onward

Thanks so much!