LR Question 11 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: A rise in the percentage of all 18 year olds who were…
QUESTION TYPE: Weaken
CONCLUSION: Recruitment for 18 year olds depends on how many high school dropouts the republic can recruit.
REASONING: Recruitment rates of 18 year olds went up, and so did dropout rates for 18 year olds. 18 year olds are usually either high school graduates or dropouts.
ANALYSIS: This is an awful argument. It’s true that most 18 year olds are dropouts or graduates. But guess what…24 years olds tend to be dropouts or graduates too. Almost everyone is one of the two.
We can weaken the argument by showing that the newly recruited 18 year olds weren’t very likely to be dropouts.
A lot of the wrong answers are vague. Learn to recognize that words such as “more”, “larger”, “higher”, don’t mean much.
The right answer says “rose sharply”, which does tell us something.
___________
- This sounds good, but “larger” is vague. It could mean 10,001 graduates were recruited, instead of 10,000.
- “Many” is vague, it might mean 30%. In which case we could have quite a few high school dropouts in the army without trouble.
- CORRECT. This shows that the new 18 year old recruits were more likely to be high school graduates than in the past. Note that this hardly weakens the argument. It could mean that high school graduates went from 2% to 8% of all 18 year old recruits. There could still be many more dropouts were in the army, since the number of 18 year old recruited went up.
- This applies to people who are already in the army. So they could join as dropouts, and then the army would encourage them to finish school.
- “Greater” is vague. This could mean 23.01% finished college, compared to 23.00%.
More Resources for Weaken Questions
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Weaken questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers weaken questions.
This one is hard! One where it is especially important to remember it asks what weakened the argument and not the conclusion! The rationale given on C is indeed true, but would only matter if the question was asking about evidence for the conclusion.
The argument bases that conclusion on the evidence that the specific rate of dropouts between 1980 and 1986 is increasing, and although C doesn’t prove that the republic doesn’t rely on dropouts, it does prove that the reason can’t be because of the rising number of dropouts between those years.