Public reports by national commissions, governors' conferences, and leadership groups have stressed the great need fo...

sophiescarfo July 12, 2020

the answer is A, but I am also confused as to what the specific difference between the two answers is.

shunhe July 14, 2020

Hi @naieka99 and @sophiescarfo,

Thanks for the question! So as @sophiescarfo mentioned, the correct answer to this question is (A). Let me help explain why, and also let you know why (B) is wrong.

So let’s take a recap of the stimulus. We’re told that there’s a need for better understanding of international affairs by the citizenry. Then we’re given a couple of if statements, which suggests conditional logic and diagramming might be useful for this question.

First, we’re told that if the country is to remain a leading nation in an era of international competitiveness, then this need is undeniable. We can diagram this

Remain leading nation —> Need for better understanding of international affairs

Now on to the next statement. If there’s a need for the citizenry to have a better understanding of international affairs, then all of the new teachers must be prepared to teach their subject matter with an international orientation. We can diagram this

Need for better understanding of international affairs —> New teachers teach with international orientation

And now we can see that we can link these statements together with the transitive property. Remember that if A—>B and B—>C, we can link those statements together to get

A—>B—>C

Which can be simplified to

A—>C

And so here, we can get


Remain leading nation —> Need for better understanding of international affairs —> New teachers teach with international orientation

which can be simplified to

Remain leading nation —> New teachers teach with international orientation

We’re asked for something that must be true based on these statements. Now look at answer choice (A). It tells us that if the country is to remain a leading nation in an era of international competitiveness, then new teachers must be prepared to teach their subject matter with their international orientation. And this is exactly what we got above! So (A) must follow from the stimulus, and is the correct answer choice.

Now let’s take a look at (B). (B) says the same thing, but switches the “if” and “then” conditions! It tells us that if new teachers are prepared to teach their subject matter with an international orientation, then the country will remain al leading nation in an era of international competitiveness. This is diagrammed

New teachers teach with international orientation —> Remain leading nation

In other words, (B) switches the necessary and sufficient conditions; it’s a mistaken reversal. And (B) doesn’t have to follow because of this and is the wrong answer. In general, X—> Y does not mean Y—>X. For example, consider the statement “if it rains, I’ll bring my umbrella.” Does that mean that if I brought my umbrella, it rained? No, I could’ve brought my umbrella for other reasons, like me thinking that it was going to rain. Same principle applies here.

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