LR Question 19 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Young people believe efforts to reduce pollution…
QUESTION TYPE: Necessary Assumption
CONCLUSION: We should try to keep children motivated by helping them believe better futures are possible.
REASONING: Young people believe it’s impossible to reduce pollution, poverty and war. People lose motivation to work on things they think are impossible.
ANALYSIS: This is a necessary assumption question. I found this one difficult to prephrase.
If you don’t know what the answer is going to be, you should do three things:
- Look carefully at the conclusion and reasoning so that you know how they fit together. This lets you spot weak points.
- See which answers mention a couple of terms from the argument.
- Negate those answers to see if they lead to the conclusion.
Now that I’ve reviewed the question, I realized that the author never said that belief in a better future will lead to motivation. They just assumed it would, which is why B is the answer. But in timed conditions, the negation test let me figure that out even when I couldn’t predict the answer.
___________
- This gets things backwards. The author said we should make people believe in a better future in order to motivate them. The reverse assumption isn’t necessary.
- CORRECT. The negation wrecks the argument.
Negation: Letting people believe in a better future will not improve their motivation. - This is a value judgment. The stimulus was about facts: will young people lose motivation, or will they not lose motivation?
- This isn’t necessary. The author only wants young people to try. It would be nice if they succeed in ending problems, but the main thing is to make an effort.
- It doesn’t matter why current problems exist. The stimulus is only about whether we can motivate youth now.
Hi Josh,
(C) doesn’t work here, because the argument doesn’t RELY on the assumption that optimism is better than pessimism. The argument is trying to show that optimism will help the future, but it isn’t making any assumptions that it is better.
It DOES assume that a young person’s belief in a better future will lead to motivation, and that is what the argument is really about, which is why (B) is correct.
Hope that helps!
For C would another reason why it is wrong is because the stimulus says that “better futures ARE POSSIBLE”. This does not mean that the future is indefinitely going to be be better which would eliminate the the “illusory vision” part of c?