#9 - Court records from medieval France show that in the

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Weaken-CE. The correct answer choice is (A)

The author of this stimulus begins by discussing the increase of violent interpersonal crimes arrests from one century to the next. The author assert that if this increase was not based on false arrests, it must reflect an increase in personal crimes from those times.

Answer choice (A): This is the correct answer choice, because it provides an alternate explanation for the increase in arrests. The society may not have been getting more violent—if the category of crime was expanded, this could obviously increase the number of arrests.

Answer choice (B): There is no question that violence existed at some point during both centuries under discussion, so this information is irrelevant to the argumentation in the stimulus.

Answer choice (C): This information is rather vague—an increase in the number of personal peace treaties tells nothing about whether the increase in number of arrests reflects an increasingly violent society.

Answer choice (D): The stimulus deals with the comparison between one entire century and another, so this answer choice, which deals with one small shift during one of the centuries, has no effect on the strength of the author's argument, so this answer choice is incorrect.

Answer choice (E): This incorrect answer choice deals with a killer that is entirely outside the scope of the discussion. While the stimulus discusses arrests for violent interpersonal crimes, this answer choice deals with disease, which tells nothing of whether people were becoming more violent or not, from century to century.

[Johnclem]

Hi powerscore,
I got this question right but I spent a lot of time trying to get rid of E. I see E as providing us with an alternate reason for the percentage increase. Please help!

1) from 1300-1400 records show an increase of arrests by 30% compared to 1200-1300
C: medieval France had a higher level of documented interpersonal violence in the years 1300 to 1400 than in the years 1200-1300.

E) the population of medical France increased substantially during the first five decades of 1300 until the deadly bubonic plague decimated the population of France after 1348.

So I get that it's talking about different kinds of deaths, not the ones the stimulus is considered with, but if there was a major drop in population wouldn't that show why there was an increase in the percentage ? Ie. If 3 people are left after the disease , that could be 100% of the people that were arrested , even if the number of offenders didn't actually increase .

[Clay Cooper]

Hi Johnclem,

Thanks for your question.

If answer choice E could be interpreted to mean that overall the population had decreased between 1300-1400, then that would actually strengthen the conclusion, because it would indicate that the higher number of arrests were distributed among even fewer people than before; therefore, interpersonal violence must have risen.

I like the way you are thinking; changing the numbers by suggesting an increased population (the opposite of what E says) could in fact weaken the conclusion that the level of violence had risen; that was my exact prephrase, actually. I don't think, though, that we can interpret E to mean anything in terms of provable population change, because the terminology is too vague. What is a 'substantial' increase, in terms of percentage? What does it mean for a population to be 'decimated'? The literal meaning means reduced by 10%; I'm pretty sure, though, that the plague wasn't that exact, and therefore I don't think that's what the author means by using 'decimated' here. I think, in the end, answer choice E tells us exactly nothing that we can actually use to strengthen or weaken the conclusion.

I hope that clarifies it.

[Shrilaraune]

Hi Clay,
This still confuses me. The premises don't speak directly about actual numbers, only percentages. So while we know that the number of interpersonal violence reports went up, we only the percentage by which it did. I can see why this omission may make E attractive.

With C, there's the matter of nonviolent crimes being categorized--or documented as violent. When I read that I think, well so what? whether they were actually nonviolent or not doesn't matter, they were documented as violent and so still count as violent incidents. If the conclusion had said there was a rise in interpersonal violence (rather than documented interpersonal violence) then C would seem more convincing to me.

As it stands, I don't know why C is the answer.

[Ben DiFabbio]

Hi Clay,
This still confuses me. The premises don't speak directly about actual numbers, only percentages. So while we know that the number of interpersonal violence reports went up, we only the percentage by which it did. I can see why this omission may make E attractive.

With C, there's the matter of nonviolent crimes being categorized--or documented as violent. When I read that I think, well so what? whether they were actually nonviolent or not doesn't matter, they were documented as violent and so still count as violent incidents. If the conclusion had said there was a rise in interpersonal violence (rather than documented interpersonal violence) then C would seem more convincing to me.

As it stands, I don't know why C is the answer.

Hey Shrilaraune,

The correct answer to this question is actually (A), which you described accurately in your response, but referred to it as (C).

I can see why that answer doesn't totally satisfy your intuition, but consider the implications of an expansion in the type of crimes that are reported as "violent" in a way that includes nonviolent crimes. That would expose an error in documentation, but it would not mean that "documented interpersonal violence" actually increased in this period.

If the legal definition of "dog" was expanded to include any animal with four legs, would the dog population suddenly skyrocket? Answer choice (A) just tells us that some cats were improperly reported as dogs.

If the category of documented violent crimes included nonviolent crimes, that would be an error that doesn't reflect reality. In reality, documented interpersonal violence did not increase. Some nonviolent crimes were mistakenly categorized as violent crimes.

So (A) weakens the argument, revealing a documentation error that explains the increase, making it incorrect to conclude that documented interpersonal violence was actually on the rise.

I hope that helps!

[KendrickFrontiers]

Hey PowerScore team!

Had a little confusion on this question. I can see why (A) is right since it (luckily) matched pretty close with my prephrase, but (C) is still a strong contender for me. If there was an increase in individual agreements that swore not to attack, wouldn't that have some affect on the level of violence? Is it because there is an unknown relationship between peace treaties and violence, or is a promise not to do violence enough to assume that there will be less violence?

Thanks in advance!

[Robert Carroll]

KendrickFrontiers,

Your last question is on point - there is an unknown relationship between peace treaties and violence, as you say. There's no way to track the correlation between oaths not to do violence and actual violence. Are people promising not to attack because there's so much violence there needs to be oaths against it? Are the oaths followed? Broken? None of these questions can be resolved in a consistent way - an increase in oaths against violence is compatible with more, less, or the same level of violence in about equal percentages, so we have no idea what's happening with actual violence.

Robert Carroll

[cd1010]

Hello,

I wanted to ask about the reasoning for why D is incorrect. The official explanation is:

Answer choice (D): The stimulus deals with the comparison between one entire century and another, so this answer choice, which deals with one small shift during one of the centuries, has no effect on the strength of the author's argument, so this answer choice is incorrect.

However, I didn't pick D because: Even though this could have been an alternative reason for why violence increased (because there was a war happening in a specific region in France that might have inflated numbers for overall France), the stimulus says that "violent interpersonal crimes" specifically refers to crimes "not committed in wars", and Answer Choice D doesn't give us enough to say definitively whether violence in Normandy and Gascony was interpersonal (i.e. it could have been both war-related and inter-personal).

Regarding the official explanation, I'm confused why just because the AC refers to an event that occurs during the latter part of the century is grounds for saying that the AC has no effect? The stimulus doesn't really talk about distribution of crimes within the century.

Thanks in advance!

[Chandler H]

Hi again, CD!

The official explanation is correct to say that answer choice (D) has no effect on the strength of the author's argument, but I understand your confusion, and I will try to clarify.

Like you said, the violence in Normandy and Gascony certainly could have ben war-related, in which case (D) has no effect on the argument, because "violent interpersonal conflict" refers to crimes not committed in wars.

However, in the case that the violence in Normandy and Gascony was not war-related—that is, if it 100% counted as "violent interpersonal conflict"—what effect does that have on the argument? None at all, actually, because the author is arguing that violent interpersonal conflict did increase in that century. So (D) is not affecting the argument at best, and actually strengthening it at worst.

Well done deducing that!

[cd1010]

Ah yes now it does! I guess I forgot the question while breaking down the AC