In the first paragraph, the author refers to a highly reputed critic's persistence in believing van Meegeren's forger...

jordierose02 on June 9, 2023

Example 4

I got 4 correct by process of elimination, but I wanted to ask about the use of new/different vocabulary in the conclusion. Oftentimes in answer explanations, we are told that we should pay close attention to vocabulary changes between the premise and the conclusion as this could highlight an unstated gap/assumption in the reasoning and could be a flaw in the argument. In this scenario it talks about "allowing more steel imports" and the conclusion talks about "not lifting restrictions on steel imports". I see the connection between these two phrases, but they are not exact and leave some room for interpretation/an unstated assumption. In the case of this question, it didn't matter since the other choices were wrong, but I wanted to get some clarification on how to know when to "overanalyze" the differences between the wording in the premise/conclusion, as opposed to when to accept the difference as a mutual meaning. In this specific instance I feel as though based on past answer explanations the difference in vocab would be just to then say that the conclusion is invalid as the premise only talks about not increasing imports, and while of course lifting a restriction would increase imports, there could be other things done that have the same effect, and nowhere in the premise a connection made between the two.

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jordierose02 on June 9, 2023

Especially in comparison to the structure of answer choice E which uses consistent language between the premise and conclusion.

Emil-Kunkin on June 11, 2023

Hi, I think the passage was expressing the exact same idea in both of the sentences. While they do use different words, we need to focus on what they mean. The first sentence tells us that allowing more imports would have an effect. That implies that there is some current cap on how much steel is allowed to be imported at the moment. This is the same idea expressed by the conclusion, that they will not lift those restrictions.

While there is a difference between the wording, they are referring to the exact same idea. Specifically, there's a difference between allowing more imports, as the passage said, and actually increasing imports as you put it.