Intense hurricanes only rarely strike large cruise ships at sea, since

OA is E, but isn't it out of scope? If we only take the given premises into consideration, only D can be concluded. To reason out whether that is because of an oversight on part of the designers is not relevant.

Opinions welcome.

IMHO with the OA (E)

Weather-tracking abilities in ships ( Automated navigation system )--------->Ships avoid hurricanes Performance of Automated navigation system in unexpected situations = Unpredictable.

Lets analyse the options now -

D. Whether the navigation system would perform as expected during a storm would depend on the strength of the storm.

Performance of Automated navigation system according to the stimulus is unpredictable , which means there are 2 possibilities -

1. It might work perfectly fine
2. It might malfunction

The stimulus doesn't mention the performance of the Automated navigation system on the strength of the storm... The stimulus simply states that it is unpredictable...

Hence I will mark (D)

This is an inference question, so we need an answer that clearly follows from the information provided. We have no information about the actual effects of a storm on the system, so we certainly can't choose anything as specific as D, which compares the effects of storms of differing strengths.

We've been told that it's impossible to predict the performance of the system in an unexpected situation. Therefore, we can conclude that in any situation that we know is unexpected, the system's performance can't be predicted. How do we know a situation is unexpected? The answer choice has to tell us so! Answer choice E does this perfectly. It could have mentioned a plague of locusts, an alien invasion, or the sudden transformation of the ship into a giant chocolate bar, as long as it made it clear that this event was not expected!

Note that to arrive at this conclusion, we only need to use the second of the two statements provided. The first, while it sets us up to make sense of the eventual answer, is not needed at all to arrive at that answer.

Hi Dimitry, thanks for your response.

I would have totally gone for E if all it said was "The system's performance in the hurricane would be uncertain, if the hurricane was unexpected" (though this would make it a 500 level question). It is the added info about designers' anticipation of the strength of the storm that me go for D.

As a rebuttal to the anticipation bit, according to the premises it is completely possible that the designers anticipated hurricanes and built the system accordingly, but as the argument states, the system's performance in unexpected situations is still unpredictable.

D while being specific, at least keeps it within the bounds of the argument's scope. In fact the first premise qualifies what is unexpected according to if the hurricane is intense or not. If intense hurricanes rarely strike, it is an unexpected event.

Or maybe I just haven't developed the knack of "see-ing" the answer yet. Again, this is one of those things where what ideas you come up with within 1m50s might vary from day to day. This is precisely the kind of CR that gives me sleepless nights.

A. At some point during its life, a cruise ship's automated navigation system would react inappropriately and might cause the loss of the ship

In (A) due to less strong words and not having new information makes it strong for the answer rather than (E) where it uses new information and have to assume a lot that designer would/would not think about such hurricanes.

Can some one please help why (A) is not the best answer.

No,
We are not concerned with the strength of storm.

What these statements are really trying to illustrate is that if a large cruise ship, say the Titanic, actually did manage to get struck by a hurricane then what would happen? What "E" is saying is that we cannot know what would happen because the invention itself is designed to lessen the risk of the ship getting hit, but how the invention would work in that very rare occasion is uncertain.

E

Imo E
If the designer of the ship did not test the ship for intense hurricanes ,then we can not be sure that the ship will perform as produced .it may get lost .
There E is the only option that fits the bill

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Intense hurricanes only rarely strike large cruise ships at sea, since the ships' motility and weather-tracking abilities generally allow them to avoid hurricanes. The performance of an automated navigation system in unexpected situations cannot be predicted.

Which of the following conclusions can most properly be drawn, if the statements above are true, about an automated navigation system on a cruise ship caught in a major hurricane?

A. At some point during its life, a cruise ship's automated navigation system would react inappropriately and might cause the loss of the ship.
B. The navigation system would be destroyed in a major hurricane.
C. The navigation system cannot distinguish between a major hurricane and a minor storm.
D. Whether the navigation system would perform as expected during a storm would depend on the strength of the storm.
E. The system's performance in the hurricane is uncertain, if the system's designers did not anticipate that the ships using the system would ever be in such a strong storm.[/quote]


Questions that are in or out of scope are always tough questions to judge, especially since it's an inference question. I answered E and this is how I approached it.

What I took away from the question was that in the event that a ship predicted an oncoming storm the ship could steer away or otherwise avoid the storm altogether. However, and in a strange, extreme hypothetical situation, if the storm were to magically appear over the ship itself, the performance of the auto-nav system could not be predicted. It took me two or three reads to really come to that conclusion, but that's where the disconnect between the statements exist; there is a difference between detecting a distant storm and the performance of the ship if it is actually in the storm.

That being the case, answer A was very tempting because it did seem to follow what I gathered from the given statements. At the same time, "At some point during its life, a cruise ship..." means that the auto-navigation system will inevitably fail, which is something we cannot 100% conclude. As possible as this may be, the statement guarantees a failure, something we cannot truly conclude. Therefore I marked it off the list.

B didn't make sense. The only thing mentioned about the auto nav system is that its performance is unpredictable, not that it would be destroyed.
C didn't make sense either, as the statements never mentioned the severity or strength of the storm.
D was excluded for the same reason as C. As plausible as it may seem in a real-life scenario, the severity of the storm is not mentioned.

E seemed to best address the given statements. Since the ships are supposed to be able to avoid the storms well ahead of time, it wouldn't matter how the auto-nav systems performed. However, in the event that such a storm did take the ship by surprise in some way, shape, or form, then the ability for the auto-nav system to bring the ship to safety is questionable. For that reason I chose E as the answer.

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