Strengthen with Necessary Premise Questions - - Question 15
The more television children watch, the less competent they are in mathematical knowledge. More than a third of child...
ShirnelMay 28, 2020
Ruling out cause
How would I know to look for another cause to rule it out. In the video lesson Mehran indicates in the stimulus why the answer choice that’s rules out another cause is picked (based on an indication in the stimulus). I don’t see any indication in the stimulus that would lead me to (E) being the answer.
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Thanks for the question! So if the question you’re asking is how would you know to pre-phrase an answer like this, you wouldn’t really pre-phrase this precise answer. But one of the things you should always think about is alternate explanations in general: if an argument is assuming that one explanation is the correct one, it’s generally assuming that other arguments won’t fully explain what’s going on. And so here, one of the assumptions you might pre-phrase after reading this question is the notion that the prompt is assuming that if US children and South Korean children watched equal amounts of television, they would do about equally well. And that, in turn, could rest on something like answer choice (E): that the quality of instruction is about the same to both. You can see it’s true when you use the negation technique: let’s say that actually, the US instruction in math is substantially worse. Well, then it might not be the TV’s fault, it might just be that the instruction’s worse. So recognize in general on this type of question that a correct answer might be one that eliminates alternative explanations, and keep an eye out for those as you do the problems.
Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.
