ak298 wrote:
Palmistry—the art of understanding an individual's present personality and predicting his or her future state through the study of the shape, size, and lines of the hands—is an unscientific technique. In a study, most palmists' assertions about the present financial status of the individuals in the sample population were found to be mere intelligent guesses.
Which one of the following is an assumption necessary to the argument?
A Individuals with the same financial status usually do not have a similar personality.
B There is a stable correlation between an individual's personality and his or her financial status.
C Palmistry is an effective means of predicting how personalities of individuals evolve over the long term.
D There are numerous other methods for understanding the personality of an individual that are more precise than palmistry.
E The financial future of a person is one of the most important concerns that palmists address.
Conclusion - Palmistry is an unscientific technique. It is important to understand what unscientific means here. As per me, the unscientific meaning is that something we do not observe through careful analysis of data such as plotting on the graph etc. Why is the author saying that?
Premise - Because the Palmist's assertions were mere intelligent guesses. the palmist made some guesses based on his current knowledge as opposed to careful analysis of the data.
Reasoning - For palmist to be able to make intelligent guesses of the people telling him things, he should be able to map some characteristics of a person to that person's profession based on his current knowledge. So, there should be some correlation between an individual's personality and his or her financial status. If there was no correlation between an individual's personality and her financial status then it wouldnt be possible for palmist to make intelligent guesses then this would not be a unscientific study as per the argument.
I have made a lot of assumptions to reach to the reasoning. I hope i am right. Experts, please chime in.