#1 - Critic: People today place an especially high value on

[Curtis1992]

Hello PowerScore,

I am having a bit of trouble with understanding question 17 on page 5-51 of the online course. I will attempt to display my thought process as I initially came upon the question.

When I first began the question, I took the opening sentence as premise information in regard to the relationship between ordinary people and comedians. As soon as I finished the second sentence, however, I began to diagram because felt the second sentence was largely conditional. I FLHE (people fail to live up to ideals they hold in high esteem, ----EFBC (exaggeration form the basis of successful comedy.) After I made up my quick conditional statement and read what I deemed the conclusion "Thus...hardly surprising," I came up with the pre-pharse that the correct answer when negated will attack the claim that the current popularity of comedians is hardly surprising.

I ultimately chose answer choice A because i felt that it, when negated, showed that people who enjoy the aforementioned comedians do place a high value on respect, which would essentially made the current popularity of the comedians surprising, which would hurt the argument.

After reading the administrators explanation and the other post, I am even more confused as to where I went wrong with the logic and what mistakes I am making. PLEASE HELP

[nicholaspavic]

I ultimately chose answer choice A because i felt that it, when negated, showed that people who enjoy the aforementioned comedians do place a high value on respect, which would essentially made the current popularity of the comedians surprising, which would hurt the argument.

Hi Curtis!

Welcome to the forum and don't despair!

Assumption questions are often very tricky to the student when first encountering them. Let's start with your stimulus breakdown. The language indicators can be a great help in this question. Note that the term "But" is a counterpremise indicator in the second sentence and that it's followed by "when" which is a sufficient indicator. That's where the author's real argument is starting in this stimulus. In other words, the first sentence is mere contextualization (or a set up, or an introduction, call it whatever you like) for what follows in the second explanatory sentence.

And you are correct, there is conditional logic in the second sentence:

People fail to live up to ideals they hold in high esteem exaggeration forms the basis of successful comedy

Then as you correctly note, we get the conclusion indicator of "thus" and "the current popularity of comedians who display disrespect in their acts is hardly surprising." But [img]why[/img] isn't it surprising? Well, we have to go back to the second sentence's conditional statement to figure it all out. Does the conditional ask us to consider people who value an ideal especially highly? In fact, it does! And soon with enough practice, you will actually be able to prephrase these.

Looking at Answer Option (A), is the conditional logic of the second sentence and the author's conclusion making a judgment about people enjoying disrepectful comedy who place no value on respect? That's actually not within the scope of the author's conditional argument and conclusion and it's trying to confuse you into pulling in that statement from the first sentence that has no bearing on the author's actual argument. I think that's where your getting confused.

But now looking at Answer Choice (D), let's negate it. If people who value an ideal especially highly do always succeed in living up to their ideal then it [img]would[/img] be very surprising indeed that such comedians are popular. That's why (D) works and it is the correct answer choice.

Thanks for the great question and I hope this helps!