General issues with weaken questions

[mgele]

I am having difficulty grasping the concepts of weaken questions. I usually watch the modules before class or after to reinforce learning. Usually the modules help a great deal and have improved the majority of the sections; however, my accuracy with weaken questions has gotten worse from practice test 1. While working on the homework, I generally get a streak of three or so right, followed by the next three questions wrong. So when I believe I am improving I get into a streak of consistently wrong answers.

Overall, I find myself narrowing the question down to two answers. Most of the time, probably all of the time one of the answers is the correct choice. However, I also have another answer that is out of scope or not relevent that I wind up selecting instead. And while looking back and reviewing why the answer choice I selected was, I can understand why the correct answer was better. But this review does not help me in the case of future questions.

Just one example question to start off would be lesson 3 page 85 question 27. Talking about "sugar-free" labeling.

I narrowed the answer choices down to B and C and attempted to be critical; however, I chose C.

I reasoned that while their is a necessity of sugar free labels for people with diabetes, the stimulus discussed the knowledge of the the manufacturers being aware of the tendency of the consumers to purchase "sugar-free" products believing them to be "low calorie" and then building weight loss diets around that belief.

I chose C because if consumers are slow to notice label changes, the change from sugar-free or to sugar-free would generally not have a large impact on their purchases.Or otherwise saying labels do not really have a great impact on the consumer.

Furthermore, while making B a contender, I eventually decided against it because I felt diabetes was out of scope. The necessity for the label made it a contender; and overall hurt the arguement.

I think I have an issue determining what is out of scope and what is relevent new information and where the barrier is crossed. Possibly it is because I am not critical enough, or because I overthink answer choices.

Thank you.

[Jon Denning]

Thanks for the questions. I'll talk about Weaken as a general idea first, then address the specific question you mention.

To me, success with Weaken questions tends to hinge on two things: your ability to identify and focus on the conclusion, and the nature of your prephrase. All too often I see people who struggle with Weaken questions either fail to identify the argument itself (the conclusion), or, even after finding it, fail to focus on exactly what it says. Any time you encounter argumentation you MUST isolate the explicit conclusion given, and that's particularly important with Weaken/Strengthen because it's that exact conclusion that the correct answer choice must affect. A lot of tempting wrong answers will attack a conclusion similar to the one in the stimulus, but not the EXACT conclusion.

Secondly, a good prephrase is critical if you want to consistently succeed with weaken questions. And by "good" I don't mean precise necessarily, I simply mean accurate with respect to the task at hand. So if the conclusion is something like "we should not vote for the mayor's tax proposal," a good weaken prephrase would be something like "find an answer that gives a reason why we SHOULD vote for the proposal (or why the proposal would prove beneficial if approved)." You don't need to be concerned with what that benefit might be per se, but know what you need the correct answer to do and you're well on your way to finding it.

For the question you mention, the author feels that "sugar free" shouldn't be allowed on labels if people might confuse it with "low calorie" (or misunderstand what it means). To weaken that, we want some reason that "sugar free" might be more permissible (or even necessary) than the author believes. Answer choice B gives that reason: there is a certain group of people who need to know when something is in fact sugar free, hence leaving it on labels is more important/beneficial than the author believes. That's all we need to show to weaken the argument.

For C, whether or not that type of label should be allowed isn't affected at all by how quickly people adapt to label changes. Slow or fast, this answer choice doesn't change the idea that a certain type of label SHOULDN'T be allowed if it could cause confusion. Again, focusing on the explicit conclusion hopefully make this distinction easier to see.

I hope that helps!