Most people are indignant at the suggestion that they are not reliable authorities about their real wants. Such self ...
stormbeelerAugust 29, 2015
breakdown
I skipped this one due to running out of time, looking back I can see how the correct answer choice makes sense, but I'm trying to show myself how the rest of the passage supports the main point. In showing that the knowledge is not easy to aquire, hard work, and risky, then following that people unconscious ly convince themselves, is the author trying to disprove the people that are indignant? As Im typing this it seems as the last sentence pretty much stamps it out.
thanks!
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The conclusion of the argument is that people are not necessarily reliable authorities about what they really want.
The author is not trying to disprove why people are indignant. People being indignant at the suggestion that they are not reliable authorities about their real wants is merely a fact stated at the beginning of the argument and the rest of the argument explains why people are not necessarily reliable authorities of their real wants.
Hope that clears things up! Please let us know if you have any other questions.
nikorasuOctober 5, 2017
I'm having trouble eliminating responses to reach E as an answer. I chose B, and i'm assuming that it's incorrect because the passage never states that knowledge of what one wants was originally though to be desirable. But I can't manage to eliminate to remaining options.
MehranOctober 7, 2017
Hi there. No problem, let's review the various answer choices.
Let's look carefully, first, at the stimulus. This is an argument, but the conclusion is not spelled out explicitly. Rather, it follows logically from the premises: P: Most people are indignant at the suggestion that they are not reliable authorities about their real wants. P: Such self knowledge, however, is not the easiest kind of knowledge to acquire. P: Indeed, acquiring [such self knowledge] often requires hard and even potentially risky work. P: To avoid such effort, people unconsciously convince themselves that they want what society says they should want.
All right. So, if all of these premises are true, what logically follows from them? The conclusion that most people are *not* reliable authorities about their real wants.
Why? Because most people avoid the effort required to gain the self knowledge necessary to become a reliable authority about their real wants.
This is answer choice (E).
Let's use process of elimination and explain why the incorrect answer choices are wrong.
(A): yes, there is textual support for this claim, but that's not the central point of the stimulus.
(B): there is no textual support for this claim. The author of the stimulus is not saying that self knowledge is not desirable. There is no such value judgment in the passage.
(C): again, there is no textual support for this claim. Nothing in the stimulus establishes that people cannot really want what they should want.
(D): here, too, there is no textual support. This is much too broad a statement — there is no support for the sweeping claim that people *usually* avoid making difficult decisions. People might make all kinds of difficult decisions, and yet it still may be true that such people avoid the potentially risky effort required to gain true self knowledge (which is all that the stimulus addresses).
Hope this helps! Please let us know if you have any additional questions.
huntlavenderApril 11, 2018
So there is no stated Conclusion in the argument but just premises and you have to pick the conclusion from the answers? This seems to come up more and more? What percentage of questions will be this way?
