LR Question 24 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: No one who works at Leila’s Electronics…
QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Parallel Reasoning
CONCLUSION: Lester must have gotten a poor performance evaluation.
REASONING: You can’t have both poor performance and a raise. Lester didn’t get a raise.
ANALYSIS: The evidence is that if you have one, you can’t have the other.
The conclusion gets it backwards and says that if you don’t have one you must have the other.
Evidence: PE or R
Mistaken Interpretation: PE or R
This type of relationship is heavily tested on in-out grouping games in logic games. There is a big difference between not-both and either-or statements.
Not both is at least one of the two missing.
Either-or is at least one of the two present.
___________
- This is a good argument. They correctly use the evidence to show that since the neighbors have one they can’t have the other.
- This is a good argument. They’ve correctly shown that since the neighbors own, they don’t rent.
- This is a good argument. The premise says: no rent ➞ own
- CORRECT. The evidence says you can’t have both. But that doesn’t mean that if you don’t have one then you have the other. Maybe a relative owns the house, for example.
Evidence:ownORpay rent
Mistaken Interpretation: own OR pay rent - This is a good argument. Not own ➞ Pay rent is the evidence.
More Resources for Flawed Parallel Reasoning Questions
- Conditional Reasoning Article: Learn about conditional statements.
- LR Diagrams Guide: Learn how to draw LR diagrams.
- Flaw drills: Practice identifying flaws.
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Flawed Parallel Reasoning questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers flawed parallel reasoning questions.
The notation should definitely be improved on the question. Using “PE” is very confusing, as it could mean “Performance Evaluation” or “Poor Evaluation”, both of which are technically correct for this question.
Fair point, though “performance evaluation” isn’t actually a condition for anything. Ultimately you have to make diagrams which make sense for you and pick acryonym which works for your brain. For me, my brain saw this as poor evaluation, as I knew that a neutral or good evaluation was no condition.
You could do PPE, but I’ve found using more than two letters for an acryonym tends to lead to worse results. Otherwise, I can’t think of a good, short acryonym for this one. You could do “BE”, bad evaluation, but that doesn’t match the stimulus. You could do PP perhaps.
When reading these explanations, I recommend making your own diagrams, and editing any acronyms as needed. Ultimately I’m just laying out the structure of what’s happening, and I think the structure is pretty clear here regardless of acronym. Though if others had this same confusion, let me know.
Note: This is an old comment but I wanted to clarify the point.