Flawed Parallel Reasoning Questions - - Question 49

For any given ticket in a 1000-ticket lottery, it is reasonable to believe that that ticket will lose. Hence, it is ...

nizhoni November 11, 2019

A vs C

Hello. I narrowed it down to A and C, but I chose C. Can you help me figure this out?

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BenMingov November 12, 2019

Hi Nizhoni, thanks for the question!

In these flaw/parallel questions, we should first try to understand what it is we are paralleling from the stimulus.

The stimulus is applying the odds of an individual ticket winning (very low odds) to say that it is reasonable to assume no ticket wins. This is actually quite unreasonable. Imagine you have put in 40,000 marbles into a big container and only one of them is blue and the others are red. Even though your odds of pulling out the blue one are extremely small, it would highly incorrect to conclude that you will never pull out blue.

This is the same with answer choice A, pulling out an ace is a 1/52 chance (assuming no jokers!), but we cannot conclude that we will never pull out an ace.

Answer choice C is parallel applying the odds of a single event within a whole to the whole itself. It just says because something is highly unlikely, it won't occur. Also incorrect, but in a different way.

Hope this helps!

nizhoni November 13, 2019

Thank you so much Ben!