Some environmentalists question the prudence of exploiting features of the environment, arguing that there are no eco...

ielkind April 2, 2020

Very Difficult to Diagram

So after reading the stimulus and classifying it as a set of facts, I found the second half of the stimulus (the environmentalists using non-economic justification) to be difficult to diagram. Would you be able to help me out? However, it was easy for me to pick out the answer choice, or at least I think. I chose B because it made sense relative to the rest of the answers. Would you recommend answering a question without diagramming, if it saves time? I think I would have been far more confused trying to diagram the stimulus.

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shunhe April 2, 2020

Hi @ielkind,

Thanks for the question! With this question, I also wouldn’t try to diagram what’s happening here. As you mentioned, figuring out the answer choice based on your understanding of the passage without diagramming works fine with questions like this one. Some questions are actually, in my view, made unnecessarily complicated by diagramming, and diagramming takes up precious time. When you encounter one of these questions, I would definitely recommend not trying to do a full diagram, which will also definitely save time. Especially in cases where diagramming the stimulus actually confuses you.

Generally speaking, we should diagram if there’s a reason to diagram. The presence of indicator words, such as “if,” “only if,” and “unless” provide reasons to diagram—there might be some logical chains being made in the argument that will be better understood if drawn out. Or quantifiers, such as “some” and “most” and “all” and “none,” are also indicators. Although “some” and “many” appear in this passage, however, notice that the fact that we’re not really doing logic with them in the same sense that we might be in stimuli like “all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.”

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.