LR Question 16 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Stress is a common cause of high blood pressure…
QUESTION TYPE: Most Strongly Supported
FACTS:
- Stress often causes high blood pressure.
- Some people can lower their blood pressure by calming their minds and reducing stress.
- Most people can calm their minds by exercising.
ANALYSIS: On most strongly supported questions, you must combine facts. The combination doesn’t have to be true, like a “must be true” question. It just has to “make sense”. Here, we see this linkage:
Exercise ➞ calm mind ➞ reduce stress ➞ lower blood pressure
These are not conditional statements. The arrows just represent which way the ideas flow. It sounds like it’s possible that exercise can lower stress and blood pressure. “Most Strongly Supported” questions can have fuzzy deductions. Forgot the strict logic you may use on more formal question types. (Normally, you can’t combine a “most” and a “some” statement like this question does.)
___________
- This gets things backwards. We know lower stress can lead to lower blood pressure, but the reverse might not be true.
- We don’t know this. The second sentence only said “some” people can do this. It might not be true for “most” people.
The fact that “most” people can calm their mind by exercise can’t increase the percentage of people who can lower blood pressure by calming their mind. Those are two different groups. - This is too strong. The second sentence only says “some” people can lower their blood pressure by calming their mind. That could be as low as 1%. Maybe lack of exercise only increases blood pressure for those people.
- This is too….direct. We can say that exercise may lower blood pressure, but it’s not a direct effect. There are several steps involved.
If something directly affects another thing then there are no intermediate steps. - CORRECT. This is fairly well supported. “Some” could be as low as one person, and that seems likely based on the stimulus.
More Resources for Most Strongly Supported Questions
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Most Strongly Supported questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers most strongly supported questions.
Both D & E are correct. D is more vague but more inclusive of the passages parameters. E is more precise but less inclusive of the parameters in the passage.
D is absolutely not correct. The stimulus lays out how exercise *indirectly* affects blood pressure. There’s no direct connection. This isn’t simply a question of vagueness.
Note: This is an old comment but I wanted to clarify the point.
Hi,
Is it a general rule for “Most Strongly Supported” questions that we should not obey the usual rules of making additive deductions with “most” and “some” statements?
As you point out in this explanation, we usually would not be able to make the jump from
Exercise –M–> Calm mind –S–> Reduce stress
over to
Exercise –S–> Reduce stress
Thanks,
JL
Yup. MSS are just about what’s “probably” true, so you can be a bit looser in deductions. Rather than be critical, you’re trying to *help* connect the statements.
Also, increasingly they want you to use common sense reasoning. In the case of humans and exercise or stress reduction through calm minds, it’s likely that those numbers are more like 80% for exercise, and 30% for calming minds. Or something like that – point being, we know from experience with humans that they won’t be at their strict logical minimums.