| Critical Reasoning Butler: May 2025 |
| May 9 | CR 1 | CR 2 |
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CR 1 The Supreme Court is no longer able to keep pace with the tremendous number of cases it agrees to decide. The Court schedules and hears 160 hours of oral argument each year, and 108 hours of next year’s term will be taken up by cases left over from this year. Certainly the Court cannot be asked to increase its already burdensome hours. The most reasonable long-range solution to this problem is to allow the Court to decide many cases without hearing oral argument; in this way the Court might eventually increase dramatically the number of cases it decides each year.
Which of the following, if true, could best be used to argue against the feasibility of the solution suggested?
A. The time the Court spends hearing oral argument is only a small part of the total time it spends deciding a case.
B. The Court cannot legitimately avoid hearing oral argument in any case left over from last year.
C. Most authorities agree that 160 hours of oral argument is the maximum number that the Court can handle per year.
D. Even now the Court decides a small number of cases without hearing oral argument.
E. In many cases, the delay of a hearing for a full year can be extremely expensive to the parties involved.
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CR 2 Less than 10 percent of the world`s people, and of the participants in combat sports worldwide, are left-handed. However, a majority of top-level competitors in combat sports worldwide are left-handed.
Which of the following, if true, most helps to resolve the discrepancy presented in the passage?
A. Left-handedness is more common in primitive cultures with high rates of death by violence than in other primitive cultures.
B. Among top-level competitors in many non-combat sports, such as tennis and baseball, left-handedness is also much more common than in the general population.
C. In many cultures, children are discouraged from performing tasks with their left hands, even if the left hand is their dominant hand.
D. Because left-handedness is so rare, opponents of left-handed fighters are ill equipped to handle the positions and angles from which those fighters attack.
E. A significant number of left-handed competitors in combat sports have trained under coaches who have forced them to fight from right-handed positions and angles.