LR Question 6 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Letter to the editor: Your newspaper’s advertisement…
QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Reasoning
CONCLUSION: The newspaper is wrong to claim that it covers the school’s most popular sports.
REASONING: The newspaper doesn’t cover a sport (track) that has a high participation rate.
ANALYSIS: The letter to the editor uses two different versions of popular: one refers to how much people like watching a sport, the other refers to how many people participate in a sport.
Track and field is popular to compete in. But it’s boring. So boring to watch. Whereas only a few people play basketball, but it’s exciting to watch. We know from common knowledge that if a newspaper says they cover the most popular sports, they mean “popular to watch”. Newspapers print stuff that’s popular to read. (Yes, you’re allowed to use common knowledge, if literally everyone would agree with it.)
___________
- There wasn’t even a correlation in the argument.
Example of flaw: The more people watch basketball, the more the newspaper covers basketball. So newspaper coverage must cause people to watch basketball. - Sample size is almost never the problem. And in this case, the entire school was sampled.
Example of flaw: I surveyed Bob, the runner, over whether running was popular. Bob says yes, and so did the running coach. So running must be popular. - CORRECT. From a fair reading of the ad, it’s pretty clear the newspaper meant “most popular to watch” and not “most popular to participate in”.
- This describes circular reasoning. This is very rare, and usually obvious.
Example of flaw: Running is popular because it’s a popular sport. - This is ad hominem. It didn’t happen. It refers to personal insults.
Example of flaw: The newspaper editor claims they provide fair coverage. But the editor smells bad! Clearly, their coverage is unfair.
More Resources for Flaw Questions
- Flaw drills: Use these to practice making examples of abstract flaws.
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Flaw questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers flaw questions.
Super glib re: “the entire school was sampled”. I won’t even mention why
So the question says: “*Of the school’s students,* 15 percent compete….”
That means they’re looking at the whole school. Same as if you say “Of America’s states, 15 of them have….”. There’s no sample, you’re just giving stats about the whole group. A sample will have to actually say it’s a sample, for example if you say “A random sample of 100 of the school’s students found…”.
If the text just lists stats about an entire group then it’s referring to the entire group. Hope that helps!
The idea is that it’s a sample of the sports at the school.
It’s false that “A sample will have to actually say it’s a sample”. Please see section 1 question 6 of preptest 147
You raise a good question but that argument is different. In that argument:
The conclusion is about all of society’s mating preferences
The sample data comes only from dating ads and university students.
Plenty of people date outside of university and without running a personal ad. So the sample is partial.
In this question, by contrast, the conclusion is about the most popular sports at the entire school school and the sample is the entire school.
A sample is always in reference to the conclusion. If your conclusion is about the entire world then sample bias can come into it unless you have data on the entire world. Not so when you restrict yourself to a single school and have complete data.
Hope that helps!