LR Question 22 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Scientist: Physicists claim that their system of…
QUESTION TYPE: Strengthen
CONCLUSION: Physicists should copy biologists and increase anti-fraud protections.
REASONING: Physicists say that physics is protected from fraud by peer review. Biologists once said they were protected from fraud, but they weren’t. But now biology increased its protections against fraud.
ANALYSIS: Don’t get fooled by the question stem. This is a strengthen question, not a most strongly supported question. You’re supposed to support the conclusion. There are a couple of problems with this argument:
- We don’t know why biology faced fraud. Maybe their peer review system wasn’t very effective. Physics might have a better peer review system.
- We don’t know that fraud is bad for physics. The argument concludes that reducing fraud will help physics, but it doesn’t give any evidence that fraud will set physics back.
Be careful in how you use outside knowledge. You can use it to generate hypotheses. Maybe fraud is bad. It seems like it should be. But you can’t use outside knowledge to prove anything. You can suspect fraud is bad, but you can’t assume it unless the argument says so.
___________
- CORRECT. This says fraud is bad. Making this explicit strengthens the argument. If fraud isn’t bad, then how will reducing it help physics?
- This shows that biology adopted an effective system. It doesn’t show that physics will benefit from increased fraud protection.
- This very slightly weakens the argument, by showing that fraud can’t be eliminated. But this doesn’t really impact anything. The stimulus didn’t say we have to eliminate fraud entirely.
- This weakens the argument. Physics today is better protected than biology used to be. Maybe more protections are unnecessary.
- This weakens the argument, slightly. Based on past evidence, physics is already protected against fraud.
More Resources for Strengthen Questions
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Strengthen questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers strengthen questions.
Do we know what biologists did to enhance their discipline’s safeguards? It could be something other than peer review, right? So when C says that no system of peer review is completely effective in any discipline, it could help the argument by proving that the current method adopted by physicists is really not effective.
A just seems better to me because it links the progress idea that was left hanging at the end of the argument, but C got me thinking.
The biologists might have done something other than peer review, yes. The argument is saying biologists also thought peer review was enough like physicists, were wrong, and then have enhanced safeguards which has given them good results. We don’t know exactly what they did (could be further improving the process of peer reviewing or could be something else).
What biologists did still doesn’t change that C is a bad answer though. C just tells us that peer review will never completely eliminate fraud. But the argument isn’t that physicists need to eliminate fraud entirely, just that it would be good for progress to have better protections against it.
Note that we also don’t know whether physicists have other anti-protection measures as well. C would be more tempting if we knew they only relied on peer reviews, but we don’t know that.