Some planning committee members—those representing the construction industry—have significant financial interests in ...

Saphi December 6, 2019

Follow up to Persons vs. Planning Committee

Thanks @Ravi for the explanation! Following up to this question, I'm hoping you can help clear up some thoughts. When combining the premises, I didn't intuitively read "some people with significant financial interests in the planning committee's decisions don't live in thesuburbs." (which I think makes it sound like people was a subset of committee members - when would then make E a logical choice) Instead, I read "some planning committee members, with significant financial interest, do not live in the suburbs. " Make planning committee members a subset of people. I did the same with questions #8 where Mathematicians were a subset of Individuals (these reasoning helped eliminate a few answer choices). It would truly help to compare these questions! My question: How do I think about differentiating between subsets and their respective whole?

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Skylar December 8, 2019

@Saphi, maybe I can help.

This is how I diagrammed the passage when I read it:
(1) PCM - some - SFI.
We can reverse this to say: SFI - some - PCM.
(2) CI -> SFI.
The contrapositive of this is: NOT SFI -> NOT CI.
We can also change this into a some statement: SFI - some - CI.
(3) PCM -> NOT LS.
The contrapositive of this is LS -> NOT PCM.
We can also change this into a some statement: NOT LS - some - PCM.
(4) PCM - some - WS.
We can reverse this to say: WS - some - PCM.

So, I diagrammed each statement individually. At this point, I can now look to combine statements.
I believe this may provide you with a way to differentiate between subsets and their respective wholes when it does not work intuitively because you can keep clear and separate diagrams first to prevent misinterpretation, and then you can look for relations and connections.

In this case, I can combine diagrams (1) and (3) to make: SFI - some - PCM -> NOT LS.
From this, we can say: SFI - some - NOT LS.
This means that some people with significant financial interests do not live in the suburbs, which is exactly what (E) states.

Does that make sense? Please reach out with any other questions and best of luck with your studies!

Saphi December 9, 2019

@Skylar, yup - this helps! Thank you! :)

Ravi January 14, 2020

@Saphi, let us know if you have any other questions!