Everyone should have access to more than one newspaper,

Question Type:

ID the Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:

Conclusion: Everyone should have access to multiple papers.

Premises:

Every story has 2 sides. Important stories should have all sides covered. No newspaper covers all sides of all stories.

I. Conclusion: Some important stories not adequately covered by only one paper.

Answer Anticipation:
Interesting question with a lot of moving parts!

The main conclusion here is actually valid! If important stories should have all sides covered, and some important stories are not adequately covered by a single paper, then everyone should have access to multiple papersan .

Since the main conclusion is valid, the gap must be between the premises and intermediate conclusion.

Simplifying the argument at this point can help:
Important stories need all sides covered.
Newspapers sometimes don't cover all sides of a story.
Therefore, some important stories not adequately covered.

Where's the gap there? It's an overlapping set issue! Newspapers don't always cover all sides to a story, but we don't know that "sometimes" includes important stories. Maybe they always make sure to cover all sides to important stories; they let the unimportant stories ("Cute Cat Picture on Internet Causes Lowere Productivity!") slide by.

Correct Answer:
(A)

Answer Choice Analysis:

(A) Bingo. This answer choice brings up the shift between missing sides of some stories and missing sides of important stories.

(B) Reversal. The argument treats multiple newspapers as necessary to address the issue, but it doesn't state that it is sufficient to solve the problem. If I think you should study for the Logic Games section, that doesn't mean I think it's sufficient to do well on the test!

(C) Out of scope. The argument is about what people should have access to, not what newspapers should do. In fact, the argument tries to overcome a deficiency in news coverage, not correct the coverage itself.

(D) Too extreme. The argument is about having access to multiple papers, not all papers.

(E) Two issues here (pun intended). First, the argument talks about both important stories and all stories - that's the flaw! Second, even if the argument was concerned only with important stories, that's not inherently a flaw. It would only be a flaw if the premises were about only important stories but the conclusion was about all stories.

Takeaway/Pattern:
If there's an intermediate conclusion, there's a chance the flaw in the argument relates to a gap between the premises and i. conclusion.

question looks etremely suspect when 63% aka overwhelming majority has gone with wrong answer [b]. mods pls assess?

Hey, I also marked B, its a great question I feel. Writing here so that I can also reason my thinking.

B is wrong because it goes out of the scope of argument.

Argument - Everyone should have access to more than 1 newspaper - Premise 1 - As there are two sides of story



Premise 2- Since all sides of an important story should be covered,
Premise 3 - and no newspaper adequately covers all sides of every one of its stories,

Intermediary conclusion or the reasoning - some important stories would not be adequately covered if there were only one newspaper.

Here the whole argument revolves around explaining why 1 newspaper is insufficient to cover all sides of all stories. i.e. somewhere some one side of any 1 story gets missed. So the reasoning says some important stories would not be adequately covered if there were only one newspaper.

So we are concerned with proving how one newspaper is not sufficient, proving if more than one newspaper will always cover all the stories is out of scope of the argument.

This is similar to saying.

I have fever. Its impossible to reduce fever without paracetomol. So i should take paracetamol.

And the wrong option saying, there might be a case, where due to some reason, paracetamol shouldnt reduce fever. The whole argument is about we cant reduce fever without paracetamol so its suggested to take, not about will paracetamol reduce fever in every case.


Also A is correct because it addresses the subtle point of generalizing the newspaper's behavior towards important storys the same as towards all stories. There might be a case, where newspapers dont cover all the sides for normal stories, but when its an important story it covers all the sides. Hence premises always mention normal stories but the conclusion referring to only the important ones and generalizing the behaviour makes the argument flawed.

Pls do let me know if Im wrong in my reasoning.

Pls do let me know if Im wrong in my reasoning.