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Sufficient & Necessary Questions - - Question 48

Only experienced salespeople will be able to meet the company's selling quota. Thus, I must not count as an experienc...

samlhoover December 16, 2019

Help needed on the diagramming of the original question

Why would the conclusion of the original question be /MSQ --> /ES, and not /ES-->/MSQ? How do you know for sure?

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BenMingov December 18, 2019

Hi Samlhoover, thanks for the question!

The passage can be diagrammed as follows:

Meet sales quota - > Experienced salesperson

NOT meet sales quota - > NOT experienced salesperson (Note how the word "must" is used to introduce the necessary condition)

In essence, this argument is doing the following:

Reasoning: A - > B
Conclusion: NOT A - > NOT B

This is not a valid conclusion from the reasoning. The only thing other than A - > B that we can conclude from A - > B is NOT B - > NOT A (the contrapositive).

So let's look for an answer choice that makes a similar error of just negating the conditional statement without reversing it as well.

Answer choice B does exactly that.

Reasoning: Take class - > Music lover
Conclusion: NOT take class - > NOT music lover

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions!

BenMingov December 18, 2019

Hi Samlhoover, thanks for the question!

The passage can be diagrammed as follows:

Meet sales quota - > Experienced salesperson

NOT meet sales quota - > NOT experienced salesperson (Note how the word "must" is used to introduce the necessary condition)

In essence, this argument is doing the following:

Reasoning: A - > B
Conclusion: NOT A - > NOT B

This is not a valid conclusion from the reasoning. The only thing other than A - > B that we can conclude from A - > B is NOT B - > NOT A (the contrapositive).

So let's look for an answer choice that makes a similar error of just negating the conditional statement without reversing it as well.

Answer choice B does exactly that.

Reasoning: Take class - > Music lover
Conclusion: NOT take class - > NOT music lover

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions!

BenMingov December 18, 2019

Sorry for the double post!