QUESTION TEXT: Most universities today offer students a more…
QUESTION TYPE: Strengthen
CONCLUSION: University education is now more in depth and cosmopolitan.
REASONING: Currently, most university history courses now assign textbooks that mention modern Asia and Africa, and mention the history of America’s indigenous cultures.
ANALYSIS: This argument mixes two terms:
- The cosmopolitanism of University education, overall.
- Whether history courses are somewhat more cosmopolitan in their required readings.
So this argument looks at specific courses, and uses them to draw a conclusion about universities overall. This isn’t a good argument: maybe political science courses got less cosmopolitan. Or maybe fewer people take history. Who knows?
To strengthen the argument, we should show that the changes in history textbooks are representative.
___________
- “Most interesting” is a trap on many questions. Here, we’re looking for the average university experience, whereas “most interesting” refers to 0.1% of courses.
- “All periods and world cultures” is much broader than what the stimulus discussed. So this could refer to a very small percentage of universities. And this only refers to “many students”. So this answer could be utterly unrepresentative of the average university experience.
- CORRECT. This answer says that the trend in university history textbooks is representative of overall university cosmopolitanism.
- This weakens the argument. We’re trying to strengthen it.
- This tells us basically nothing. It’s making a one sided comparison. Do students in a history course which covers multiple cultures get a cosmopolitan education from that course alone? Doubtful. So this answer fails to make a useful distinction.
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