The only way that bookstores can profitably sell books at below-market prices is to get the books at a discount from ...

Emil-Kunkin March 18, 2022

Hi Jakehill,

This is the one of the biggest challenges of logical reasoning- and there are a couple of approaches.

One way is to give yourself more time on questions that involve a lot of diagramming- like this one, or like a parallel reasoning question. That would of course mean spending less time on the other questions. So, in a bit of a non-answer, getting faster and better at questions that do not require formal diagraming will actually help you in this type by taking some of the time stress off. There are some questions that probably will take a full 2 minutes, and others that might only take under a minute. Its ok to go over your "time budget" for a few questions.

That said, I think the flashcards are a great resource for timing. They help you to get faster at recognizing sufficient and necessary (as well as quantifiers) without going through the whole process of remembering what an "unless" or and "only if" mean. This is mostly a matter of repetition- the 10th time you see a statement like "the only way to make a profit is to buy at a discount" will be faster than the 2nd, and the 25th faster than the tenth, and so on.

The office hours are useful as well to see how other tutors diagram, and the way that they can translate text into formal diagrams.

One other useful note is that it is important to know when and what NOT to diagram. Not all questions that could be diagrammed must be diagrammed to get the right answer, and the office hours have some great examples of time when people do and do not diagram. Note that this question very much should be diagrammed, but in other cases it may not be a good use of time.

JakeHill April 6, 2022

This was incredibly helpful. Thank you for providing me with so many options, Emil!