#21 - A society in which there are many crimes, such as

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Must Be True-SN. The correct answer choice is (D)

This stimulus provides the conditional statement, “a society with no laws has no crimes.” This statement, and its contrapositive, can be diagrammed as follows:
Statement: no laws → no crimes
Contrapositive: crimes → laws (that is, a society with crimes has laws)
Among the answer choices, only one will reflect a valid inference based on these conditional diagrams.

Answer choice (A): This answer choice gives us the following, flawed statement:
laws → crimes
This statement is clearly a Mistaken Negation of the statement from the stimulus, so this answer choice is incorrect.

Answer choice (B): This answer choice is also incorrect, providing the following:
no crimes → no laws
This statement provides a Mistaken Reversal of the conditional statement from the stimulus. It is interesting to note that this MR is the exact contrapositive of the MN provided by incorrect answer choice (A).

Answer choice (C): This incorrect answer choice can be diagrammed as follows:
many laws → many crimes
This reflects neither a Mistaken Reversal nor a Mistaken Negation, but it is not supported by the information in the stimulus, so this answer choice is incorrect.

Answer choice (D): This is the correct answer choice, and can be diagrammed as follows: crimes → laws
This statement clearly reflects the contrapositive of the statement from the stimulus, as discussed above.

Answer choice (E): Like incorrect answer choice (C) above, this choice is unsupported by the stimulus. It would be diagrammed as follows: many crimes → many laws
This statement is not proved by the stimulus, so this answer choice is incorrect.

[ellenb]

Dear Powerscore,

I just had a question on Question 3, why Answer E is not correct? cannot many mean all too just like some could mean all. Please explain why we chose D over E?

Thanks

Ellen

[Luke Haqq]

Answer choice (E) isn't supported by the stimulus because of the second "many" in that answer choice:

(E) A society that has many crimes has many laws.

It is possible that a society has many crimes but only one, or a few laws. Thus answer choice (E) is too strong to be supported by the stimulus. Contrarily, (D) is much weaker, since it merely states that crime requires law, without adding a conjecture about the number of laws and number of crimes.

[ellenb]

Thanks for your answer, however, it seems that the stimulus seems to be strong as well.
It talks about laws in plural, that is why I thought that many laws could work?

Still related to this topic, can many actually mean all just like some?

Thanks

Ellen

[BethRibet]

Hi Ellen,

The stimulus actually doesn't support the presumption that there are "many" laws -- plural could mean as little as two (I assume you're referencing the phrase "without laws"). Whereas answer choice D, because it specifies only "some" could apply even if there only a few laws in existence.

The society might for instance have any crimes, but only 3 laws that prohibit those crimes, so it has some laws, but not many laws. Many would suggest a significant, albeit unspecified number.

best,
Beth

[ellenb]

Makes more sense thanks Beth!

[netherlands]

Hi there PS,

When I first did this question I think that I was trying to diagram too many (incorrect) portions of the passage. I went back through it ... Can you tell me if this understanding is correct? I want to make sure I can really correctly tell the difference between "absolute" statements and relationships, etc.

- "A society in which there are many crimes, should not be called lawless" - At first I wanted to translate and diagram this as "If a society has many crimes, then it is not lawless." Then I saw that you guys didn't do this and went back to figure out why.

I noticed that the word "should" doesn't really create an absolute relationship or even statement. Further, I remember you guys referring to a statement like this as a "value statement" in a different passage.

So I guess question #1) Is the use of "should" what makes this a non-absolute statement, and therefore non-conditional?

#2) If the statement had said - "A society in which there are many crimes is not a lawless society" - then this would have been a conditional statement - correct?

3) Is the "should" statement considered a value statement? / What is a value statement really? Just the expression of an opinion?

The sentence that says " A society that has no laws has no crimes" definitely seems to be more "absolute" than the earlier one.

Then there are two sentences that follow that use the words "would" and "should" again. If what I'm thinking above is correct, then when I encounter other sentences like this I can understand them not to be conditional because the relationship aren't absolute, correct?

ALSO!

The difference between D and E - I'm sure is based off the Some and Many even though you guys didn't explicitly say that in the explanation. I guess it should just make sense to choose the some (at least one) when there was no actually quantity discussed to support "many" but we know it is the case for at least one.

[Justin Eleff]

Sounds like you're on the right track here. Just think in terms of how you use the word "should" in your own life. I should get more sleep; I should eat better. We say these things because we aren't doing them yet. The word indicates an aspiration, not a thing that is concretely true already. Likewise, "a society in which XYZ happens should not be called ABC" does not mean that no one is calling it that; it means that, at least in the judgment of the speaker, anyone who is calling it that is misspeaking. Maybe people are calling it ABC, maybe not. But either way, the speaker's OPINION is that it shouldn't be happening. So diagramming this as a conditional statement, where the right side of the diagram is a NECESSARY condition (not aspirational, not something we believe should occur, but something that absolutely does occur), is a mistake. And you're right about something else, too: if the statement had been "a society in which XYZ happens *is* ABC," diagramming it would be appropriate, because now XYZ leads invariably to ABC instead of the speaker merely expressing a belief about whether it is ABC or not. Finally, you're right about the difference between answer choices (D) and (E). Remember that for any Must Be True question, the answer has to be fully supported by the text of the stimulus. Here, we can use the stimulus to prove that at least one law must exist if there are crimes, but we have no indication of a specific number of laws that must exist. It's not none, and thus is some, but we can't prove that it's many.

[netherlands]

Hm, so pretty much the only sentence that is even relevant in this passage is the absolute sentence beginning with however. That's kind of annoying! This is totally a time-stealing question.

[Steve Stein]

Hi Netherlands,

It's true--that question would have been much more straightforward if the stimulus had just said "A society that has no laws has no crimes." It's almost like the test-makers are trying to hide the ball!