QUESTION TEXT: Researcher: Overhearing only one side of a…
QUESTION TYPE: Most Strongly Supported
CONCLUSION: Hearing one half of a cellphone conversation is distracting.
REASONING:
- You have to guess what the person on the other side of the conversation is saying, and
- People on cellphones talk unusually loudly.
ANALYSIS: There’s not much to combine from the facts above. Instead, the question asks you to use common sense when evaluating the answers.
This is a bit unusual. Normally, people say that “on Most Strongly Supported questions, you take a deduction from the stimulus and find it in the answers”. Clearly, LSAC is departing from trend somewhat here.
This question instead is an argument, rather than the set of facts. LSAC basically expected you to deduce that the conclusion is the first sentence. This conclusion directly supports the right answer. If the first sentence was the only sentence, the credited answer would still be right.
….well, I said directly, but actually there are a couple assumptions you have to reasonably support to choose the right answer:
- Driving is a thing “people are doing”. [The first sentence says hearing part of a cellphone conversation distracts us from whatever we are doing]
- Being a distracted driver makes you a worse driver.
This second point isn’t in the stimulus, and you’re just supposed to bring it in as a reasonable outside assumption. If you do, the correct answer is easily supported.
___________
- This is close, but….if you’re on a cellphone, then you’re in the conversation. So this isn’t what the stimulus is talking about: you can hear the other side, and you don’t have to listen to yourself talking unusually loudly.
The stimulus was talking about listening to someone else have a phone call. - CORRECT. The first sentence directly supports this answer. Hearing half of a cellphone conversation distracts you from whatever you’re doing. Driving is a thing you’re doing, so hearing half of a conversation distracts you from driving. And, from common sense, if you pay less attention while driving, you are a worse driver.
- This doesn’t seem likely. Traditional phones were pretty similar to cellphones: you held them up to your ear and talked into them. So if you were listening to someone else on a phone call, you’d only hear one side of it. That’s at least half of the distraction from the stimulus. (If memory serves, people talk loudly on traditional phones too)
- “Inevitably” is far too strong. This answer would mean that no one, ever, could keep track of their thoughts the instant a phone call starts in a periphery. That’s extreme: some people can tune out distractions. Or maybe the distraction is minor enough that they can keep track of their thoughts through the difficulty.
- Like A, this talks about the wrong thing. The stimulus was about hearing someone else’s phone call. This answer is about your own phone call, and we have no info about that.
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