Director: If we’re going to have a training montage at this point in the movie, then it had better follow either a big breakup between the hero and his girlfriend or the death of the hero’s beloved old boxing trainer. But the trainer can’t die at this point in the movie, because the actor playing the trainer has a contract stipulating that he appear in at least 70% of the film, so if we’re going to have a training montage at this point in the movie, the hero and his girlfriend have to break up immediately prior to it.
Which of the following arguments has a structure most similar to that above?
A. If we’re going to have a cupcake sale this morning, then we’re going to have to use an internet-based coupon service, because we haven’t got time to distribute paper coupons. But the internet-based coupon services are all scams, so we may as well not have a cupcake sale this morning.
B. If Alex is going to travel to Qatar for the soccer tournament, then he’ll have to get a passport allowing him to leave the country. But Alex doesn’t have a copy of his birth certificate, so if he wants to get a passport he’ll have to bring two other forms of ID and a witness.
C. Every ride at the waterpark is either slide-based or pool-based. So if we see a slide-based ride at this end of the park, there must be a pool-based ride somewhere else in the park.
D. This abandoned warehouse would be the perfect place for either a donut factory or a reclaimed urban garden. But there’s already a popular donut factory a block away and we can’t get the permits for a garden, so we can’t buy the warehouse.
E. If we want to add some depth to the guitar solo, we either need to throw some vocoder in the mix or have Vanessa play her theremin. But the vocoder is cliché and we can’t use it without being mocked, so if we want to add some depth to the guitar solo we need to have Vanessa play her theremin.
Begin any Mimic the Reasoning question by diagramming the logic of the original argument. Our argument looks like this:
From there, find an argument with the same structure – in this case, (E). The biggest difficulty with this question is time management, there being so much blather to parse, so quickly recognizing logical affinities is crucial. One easy way to get to (E) is to notice that the original argument only negates one of two options, so scanning the answer choices for an argument that does the same, (E) should leap out.