Anatomical bilateral symmetry is a common trait. It follows, therefore, that it confers survival advantages on organ...

shunhe July 17, 2020

Hi @Connie-Ticho,

Thanks for the question! So for parallel reasoning questions, I’d recommend that you first focus on diagramming out the stimulus correctly and understanding what’s going on there. So in this passage, for example, we’d have

Common trait
~Confer advantages —> ~Common
Conclusion: Confers advantages

And if we want to see the structure of how this works, we can abstract it a little and write

A
~B —> ~A
Conclusion: B

And we know this because we can take the contrapositive of the second statement to get

A —> B

And so we want to look for an answer choice that looks like it’s going to have logic like that, and only focus on diagramming those out to save us time. So (A), for example, brings in something about taking the matter seriously which isn’t reflected elsewhere, and that’s not something that happens in the stimulus, so we don’t need to diagram it immediately. (B) definitely doesn’t have the same conditional logic, so no need to diagram it. (C) looks promising, so we can diagram it and find out that it is the correct answer. (D) has two premises that are conditional, which the original stimulus doesn’t, so we don’t have to diagram it out. And (E) introduces the idea of “reasonably be expected,” which introduces probability, which isn’t in the original stimulus. So we can focus our diagramming efforts on (C), see that it matches, and move on without having to diagram out every single answer choice.

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