QUESTION TEXT: Even in ancient times, specialized farms (farms…
QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Reasoning
CONCLUSION: Kadshim wasn’t a city.
REASONING: The land around Kadshim couldn’t have supported specialized farms. Specialized farms need cities.
ANALYSIS: This argument confuses sufficient and necessary. Specialized farms need cities. But cities don’t need specialized farms. Kadshim could have been a city even if there were only mixed farms.
The premise is: SF ➞ C
The incorrect assumption is: C ➞ SF
___________
- The argument doesn’t talk about an entire class of cities. It only talks about one city, Kadshim. That’s the only sample given; there’s no sample of a specialized farm given.
- CORRECT. This is complicated, but true. Cities are necessary for specialized farms. The argument assumes that because specialized farms didn’t exist, then a city didn’t exist. That gets things backwards.
- There’s no double interpretation. Every term always means the same thing.
- This describes a causation-correlation error. But the argument never mentioned two things always happening together. Specialized farms always need cities, but the argument failed to prove that cities need specialized farms.
- This describes circular reasoning. That’s where the reasoning is the same as the conclusion. That didn’t happen in this argument.
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