Analyzing Arguments Questions And Answers

[Meggan Shankman]

Learnand practise solving Logical Reasoning questions and answers section on "Analyzing Arguments" to enhance your skills so that you can clear interviews, competitive examinations, and various entrance tests (CAT, GATE, GRE, MAT, bank exams, railway exams, etc.) with full confidence.

Here you can find multiple-choice Logical Reasoning questions and answers based on "Analyzing Arguments" for your placement interviews and competitive exams. Objective-type and true-or-false-type questions are given too.

As you may know, arguments are a fundamental part of the law, and analyzing arguments is a key element of legal analysis. The training provided in law school builds on a foundation of critical reasoning skills. As a law student, you will need to draw on the skills of analyzing, evaluating, constructing, and refuting arguments. You will need to be able to identify what information is relevant to an issue or argument and what impact further evidence might have. And you will need to be able to reconcile opposing positions and use arguments to persuade others.

Each Logical Reasoning question requires you to read and comprehend a short passage, then answer one question (or, rarely, two questions) about it. The questions are designed to assess a wide range of skills involved in thinking critically, with an emphasis on skills that have proven to be central to legal reasoning.

As a law student, you need to draw on the skills of analyzing, evaluating, constructing, and refuting arguments. You also need to be able to identify what information is relevant to an issue or argument and what impact further evidence might have. And you need to be able to reconcile opposing positions and use arguments to persuade others.

The Logical Reasoning questions are adapted from a wide variety of sources, including newspapers, general interest magazines, scholarly publications, advertisements, and informal discourse. These arguments mirror legal reasoning in the types of arguments presented and their complexity.

Verbal Reasoning questions appear in several formats, each of which is discussed in detail in the corresponding sections linked to below. About half of the measure requires you to read passages and answer questions on those passages. The other half requires you to read, interpret and complete existing sentences, groups of sentences or paragraphs.

Typically, about half of the questions on the test are based on passages; each passage has anywhere from one to six questions associated with it. Most passages are one paragraph long, and one or two are several paragraphs long. Passages are based on material found in books and periodicals, both academic and nonacademic, and drawn from:

Questions can cover any of the topics listed above, from the meaning of a particular word to assessing evidence that might support or weaken points made in the passage. There are three question types:

GRE reading comprehension questions seek to assess critical reading skills by using texts that exhibit a level of complexity comparable to that encountered in graduate school. Passages exhibiting this kind of graduate-level prose are adapted from material found in books and periodicals, both academic and nonacademic.

To gain more exposure to GRE-level reading material, the most fruitful approach would be to become familiar with the kinds of graduate-level prose, logical reasoning and rhetorical patterns typically found in GRE reading passages. The best way to do this is to read a wide variety of texts with similar features on a regular basis or at least for a sustained period of time before your test.

Where can you find these texts? The good news is that the graduate-level prose sampled by GRE passages is not just in highly specialized academic journals. There are many excellent sites for developing the habit of reading challenging prose, many of which are readily accessible. Some of these include:

Description

Each question has three answer choices with one to three correct answers. Select all that are correct to gain credit for these questions, you must select all the correct answers; there is no credit for partially correct answers.

Skilled readers do not simply absorb the information presented on the page; instead, they maintain a constant attitude of interpretation and evaluation, reasoning from what they have read so far to create a picture of the whole and revising that picture as they go. Text Completion questions test this ability by omitting crucial words from short passages and ask you to use the remaining information in the passage as a basis for selecting words or short phrases to fill the blanks and create a coherent, meaningful whole.

Like Text Completion questions, Sentence Equivalence questions test your ability to reach a conclusion about how a passage should be completed based on partial information, but to a greater extent they focus on the meaning of the completed whole. Sentence Equivalence questions consist of a single sentence with just one blank, and they ask you to identify the two choices that lead to a complete, coherent sentence while producing sentences that mean the same thing.

When you read a text whose purpose is to persuade or argue a point, you need to analyze that text to see whether the argument is logical. Logical arguments need to be reasonable; supported with appropriate, relevant evidence from valid sources; and based on acceptable assumptions. Knowing a bit about logical arguments will help you analyze a text intended to persuade, as well as write your own persuasive, logical arguments.

In this example, all of the argument parts coordinate with one another. The evidence seems appropriate, and is especially strong if it comes from valid sources such as scientific studies published in peer-reviewed journals. The underlying assumption is supported by the evidence. As a reader analyzing the text, you could conclude that this is a logical argument.

Another complementary way to analyze an argument and evaluate a text is to investigate the three main types of appeals authors use to support their claim. These types of appeals are traditionally referred to by their Greek names: logos (appeal to logic), pathos (appeal to emotion), and ethos (appeal to authority).

Logical appeals may include facts, case studies, statistics, experiments, and expert testimony. Authoritative appeals may include citations of recognized experts and testimony of those involved first-hand in the issue. Emotional appeals may include personal anecdotes, stories, impact studies, and first-hand testimony. Many logical arguments rely on some combination of these three types of appeals. However, an argument may not be logical if a certain type of appeal does not coordinate with the claim, and/or if an author relies too heavily on emotional appeal, for example, to the exclusion of factual support.

The number and array of logical fallacies can be daunting. The main thing to remember is to look at the way in which an author states and supports the argument in a text. If there are a number of errors in reasoning, the text itself may not be valid for your purposes.

A question for you to consider: Even though the logic in this text is not totally sound, according to a careful analysis in terms of traditional logic, the author provides thought-provoking ideas. Do you think he could have achieved the same effect with stricter attention to logic?

Critical Reasoning (CR) questions are at the heart of what is tested on the GMAT, because CR questions directly challenge your thinking skills across a wide range of situations that require critical analysis, logical reasoning, and attention to detail.

In fact, some students find that Critical Reasoning GMAT questions are the trickiest questions they encounter in the Verbal section of the GMAT. To master GMAT CR, you must be able to employ smart, efficient strategies for analyzing arguments and eliminating answer choices that are carefully and cleverly worded to trick, trap, and confuse you.

For example, in evaluating the logic of CR answer choices in order to determine which is correct, you might need to know that profit equals the money taken in from selling something minus the cost of selling that thing, but you would never be required to know the relationship between mortgage interest rates and bond yields.

Every argument is composed of 3 key components: a premise or premises, which are the facts that form the foundation of the argument; one or more assumptions on which the argument is based; and a conclusion, which is supported by the premise.

There also may be some background information given in a CR passage, to add context to the argument (ex. The Turkey Lodge has been a free meeting space for community groups in the Town of Gobble for more than 40 years). It can be helpful to think of an argument as a math problem:

In other words, premises are the evidence provided by authors of Critical Reasoning arguments. This evidence may come in the form of statistics, observations, or results of scientific studies, to give a few examples.

Assumption: Unlike premises, assumptions are not stated in the passage. An assumption is an unwritten piece of information that has to be true in order for the logic of a given argument to work.

Energy Analyst: Given the amount of sunlight in our area of the world, even if the roof of the average house in our area of the world were completely covered with solar panels, the panels would provide only about two-thirds of the electrical power used by the appliances a house typically has. So, in our area of the world, rooftop solar will never be the sole source of electrical power for houses.

However, that analysis is necessary for you to become more skilled at evaluating the logic of arguments and related statements in CR questions. And becoming more skilled at doing something is exactly how you become faster at it.

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