Strengthen with Sufficient Premise Questions - - Question 2

Photovoltaic power plants produce electricity from sunlight. As a result of astonishing recent technological advances...

July 9, 2024

Somewhat of A Unique Request

One of the challenges I have is that sometimes I do not understand all the answer choices. That definitely happens with the answer choices that involve numbers. I am not a math person and my mind immediately goes into a knot. Usually I employ a variety of tricks to help me understand, like explaining things out loud, drawing pictures, etc, and usually that helps. With this question, I couldn't understand the correct answer, answer D, even after reading the explanations, until I started reading it out loud making hand motions to paint a picture with my hands of what the answer looks like. If there is an instructor who also considers themselves more of a language person than a numbers person, I would appreciate their advice on how they tackle questions and answer choices like these. Thank you. :)

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Emil-Kunkin July 15, 2024

I love to just assign numbers to things. That is, I'll give myself nice round numbers to work with. So I'd imagine that 20 years ago, it cost 1 to make a unit of traditional power and 100 to make a unit of solar power. Now, we are told that solar would only cost 10, and that traditional has increased, maybe to 1.5. With these numbers it's clear that the argument makes no sense. In fact for the argument to make sense, the starting cost for solar would have to be 10 or less (assuming we keep the cost of traditional as 1) for the argument to make sense!

I find this much easier than drawing a picture per se, I love just plugging in test numbers, usually 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, or 1000, and seeing if the logic makes sense.

July 15, 2024

Thank you, this helps :)