QUESTION TYPE: Role in argument
CONCLUSION: People’s responses to words depend on their sound as well as their meaning.
REASONING: This is a good argument. It gives us two facts. People have conditioned responses to words. Interestingly, we also have preset responses to nonsensical words such as “blegearch” and “splurf.” This adequately supports the conclusion.
Role: The question asks us what role the fact about nonsense words plays. It directly supports the conclusion by telling us that people have responses to certain nonsense words.
___________
- The conclusion does not say we have positive or negative responses to any word. The stimulus only tells us that we react to “many” nonsense words.
- This gets it backwards. If you have trouble identifying which is which, keep an eye out for phrases such as “this shows,” which usually indicate a conclusion, including in this case.
- This is not a generalization; the study examined specific words. The conclusion makes a generalization based on this evidence. Further, this premise certainly doesn’t depend on support from what we know about meaningful words.
- CORRECT. Yes. This leads directly to the conclusion when we combine it with the first premise. We can figure out the final sentence is the conclusion because it says “this shows.”
- This isn’t the conclusion, and the stimulus doesn’t claim that our reactions in experimental situations are different from those in everyday life.
Note about generalizations: Some people have trouble identifying exactly what is meant by words like generalization, used in answer choice C. An example might help. If I say:
“My dog doesn’t like it when I try to give him a bath. Several of my neighbors have noticed the same thing about their own dogs. Therefore, dogs often don’t like to get baths”, then I am making a generalization about all dogs (“They often don’t like to get baths.”) based on evidence from only a few dogs. It is a statement about dogs in general.
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