#14 - If Slater wins the election, McGuinness will be

[srcline@noctrl.edu]

Hello,

I know we have conditional logic in this problem and an unless equation, but I am having a hard time setting it up. This is my chain

S win election MCG app HPC
(+) MCG not app HPC S not win election

2. Y more qualified on comm. for 15 yrs
(+) not on comm Y not qualified

3. Unless the polls are grossly inaccurate, S will win.

S not win poll inaccurate
(+) polls accurate S will win
Also can someone please explain why E is the correct answer
Thankyou
Sarah

[Emily Haney-Caron]

Hi Sarah,

Your #1 is great. #2, I actually would not try to diagram. #3 looks good to me. Connecting those, we have: polls not grossly inaccurate S wins M appointed [i.e., someone less qualified than Y appointed]

E is actually just restating that chain without the middle; if the polls are not grossly inaccurate, M will be appointed.

Hope that helps!

[arigataco]

Can someone please explain why C is incorrect? I was between C and E and initially thought E was the better option because if the polls are a good indication, Slater will appoint McGuinness, and McGuinness is less qualified than Yerxes.

But when I looked at C, I thought of it like, if Slater wins the election, he will appoint McGuinness, therefore Yerxes will not be appointed.

S --> (not) Y
Y--> (not) S

The contrapositive tells us that if Yerxes is appointed, Slater is not the winner right? Which makes sense because we already know that if Slater won, he would not appoint Yerxes.

Im confused because both answers seem reasonable to me. I was trying to find something wrong with either of them and ultimately ruled out E because of the wording. I was thinkinh maybe E is wrong because t says that Yerxes is "more qualified" and the stimulus specifies "more qualified" in the context of running the planning commission, not in the general sense.

I am confused. Any advice would be helpful, thanks!

[Dana D]

Hey Arigataco,

We can't say answer choice (C) MBT because we have a false binary here. The stimulus says that if Slater wins, McGuiness becomes head of planning commission. We only know what will happen if Slater wins. We know nothing about what happens if Slater loses. Yerxes is more qualified, yes, but maybe Slater's opponent also planned on appointing McGuiness to the position! We just don't know. Read closely with MBT questions, because the test relies on you making assumptions such as the false binary.

Because we can't say for certain what will happen if Slater doesn't win the election, we can't definitively say (C) is the right answer. Answer choice (E) is correct because it is based only on what we do know - if the polls are not grossly inaccurate, Slater will win, and Slater will appoint McGuiness, who, by the way, is less qualified than Yerxes.

Hope that helps!