#16 - Retailers that excel in neither convenience nor

[silent7706]

Hi,

Oh boy, this one really messed me up during my practice.

I eliminated (B) and (C) quickly because of conclusion mismatch. I then eliminated (A) because of the first sentence. Moved on to (D), (E), and did not like either, so I ended up being paralyzed and randomly picked (D).

My prephrase of the stimulus goes "not being good at both aspects is unlikely to lead to success, but you don't need both. As long as you are good at one and average at the other, you are ok”

First sentence of (A) suggests "only being good at two aspects is unlikely to succeed" which does not really match my prephrase, so I eliminated it on this basis. Although after re-reading the entire choice (A) during my review, I do see the logic behind (A) seems to match the stimulus the best among the five choices.

In the hindsight, it looks that after eliminating the obvious wrong answers, the most important thing to check is whether the logic of the remaining choices matches that of stimulus. I guess I should have taken my time to read through (A) and check for its reasoning. I'd appreciate if you can offer any advice to help me improve my process.

Thanks in advance.

[James Finch]

Hi Silent,

It looks like you understand the basic way to get to a correct parallel answer, in which each argument part must be matched 1:1 with the correct answer choice, including in scope, but not necessarily in the same order (i.e. the conclusion could be the first sentence in the stimulus and the last in the answer choice).

Here though there may be an even clearer way to parallel the stimulus: we're given conditional logic in the stimulus that can then be diagrammed out in an abstract way and then used to quickly test the answer choices. We have:

P1: A + B C
P2: Some have only A or only B and still have C
C: C A or B, not necessarily both

Basically the conclusion is the contrapositive of the first premise given, while the second premise confirms that only one of A or B is actually necessary. So that's what we need to find in the correct answer choice. (A) gives us this right off the bat, making it correct.

Hope this clears things up!

[nabeatty]

I have a question regarding the conditionality in this question. I diagrammed the stimulus conditionality correctly, however when it came to answer A, the conditionality did not seem to match for me. I diagrammed: Unlikely to win-->Average speed and average endurance (these being in the necessary because of the only), and Some champions---->above average speed or above average endurance.

With this diagram, answer A doesn't match with the conditionality in the stimulus. I see that I must have interpreted the "only" language in answer choice incorrectly, but can't seem to figure out why.

Thanks!

[Adam Tyson]

The key indicator in answer A, nabeatty, is a variation on the classic sufficient condition indicator phrase "people who." Here, it's "runners who." So despite the "only" in that condition, it's "if you only have average speed and endurance, then you are unlikely to win." That use of only is not itself a conditional use, but just an indication of a limitation. Paraphrase it as "if this is all you have, then your chances of winning aren't good." It's not set up as "if you are unlikely to win, then you must be only average at speed and endurance."

I like to approach this one without a conditional diagram, instead using my favorite "abstract structure" attack for parallel reasoning. The argument is based on "If you have neither of these things, you won't succeed, but you can succeed if you have just one, so you don't have to have both." Looked at that way, without the diagram, answer A becomes pretty clear!

[nabeatty]

Thanks! That definitely clears things up. Much appreciated!