#25 - Essayist writing in 2012: At its onset, a new medium

[James Finch]

Complete Question Explanation

Strengthen—Principle. The correct answer choice is (D).

The key to this question is to the final sentence, which gives us both the conclusion and the premise it's based on. The conclusion is that it's too early to understand e-books, and the reason why is that they haven't yet reached their final form. So the Prephrase for this Strengthen—Principle question would be a conditional statement that uses an abstract version of the premise as a sufficient condition with an abstract version of the conclusion as a necessary condition, something like:

• "If not final form, then too early to understand medium," or, as contrapositive:
  
  Understand Final Form

So which answer choice comes closest to this Prephrase?


Answer choice (A): This answer fails because we're only comparing versions of the same medium, not the media that precedes it.

Answer choice (B): This answer is off base since "resemblance" isn't he focus here.

Answer choice (C): This answer introduces a technology element that isn't present in nor germane to the stimulus

Answer choice (D): This is the correct answer. This answer gives us:

• Understand Observing Evolution

Which would in turn require reaching the final form (otherwise the evolution would be incomplete).

Answer choice (E): This answer is off base, as we're not talking about different media replacing each other.

[dlehr99]

Apparently 71% of people answer this question correctly, so I must be missing something major here.

I had it narrowed to (A), (C), and (D).

(A) - ultimately ruled out as the stimulus doesn't seem to suggest we should care about the past.

(C) - selected this incorrect answer as I thought it would strengthen the argument by showing one piece on information we don't have that would be required to understand the ultimate form. i.e. it's too early to understand e-books because understanding would depend on the available technology (which presumably we don't know)

(D) - This credited answer does not seem to be significantly better than answer choice (C) i.e. it's too early to understand e-books because understanding would require the observation of the evolution of its content (which again we presumably don't have).

Can you clarify why (D) is superior to (C)?

[James Finch]

Hi D. Lehr,

The key to this question is to the final sentence, which gives us both the conclusion and the premise it's based on. The conclusion is that it's too early to understand e-books, and the reason why is that they haven't yet reached their final form. So the Prephrase for this Strengthen—Principle question would be a conditional statement that uses an abstract version of the premise as a sufficient condition with an abstract version of the conclusion as a necessary condition, something like:

"If not final form, then too early to understand medium," or Understand Final Form

So which answer choice comes closest to this Prephrase? (A) fails for the reason you noted, we're only comparing versions of the same medium, not the media that precedes it. (B) is totally off base, while (C) introduces a technology element that isn't present in nor germane to the stimulus. (D) gives us:

Understand Observing Evolution

which would in turn likely require reaching the final form (otherwise the evolution would be incomplete). Not all the way there, but close.

(E) is again totally off base, as we're not talking about different media replacing each other. So ultimately only (D) is close to the Prephrase, and as a strengthen question, it only needs to help, not prove the conclusion true.

Hope this helps!

[dlehr99]

This is great, thank you. At the time I was totally overlooking the conditional aspect of this problem and now that you've pointed it out, it makes sense.