by ohthatpatrick Sun Sep 16, 2018 8:05 pm
It would be stuff like this ....
SUFFICIENT ASSUMPTION
stimulus usually has conditional logic in it (and obvious keywords to help us find the conclusion)
ID THE CONCLUSION
stimulus almost always presents the conclusion BEFORE it present the evidence for the conclusion
DETERMINE THE FUNCTION
stimulus frequently has "conclusion-first" arguments like ID the Conclusion ... also more likely than other question types to have an intermediate conclusion
FLAW
stimulus will often contain one of the ten famous flaws
INFERENCE
stimulus usually allows us to combine multiple facts using either Conditional or Causal language
etc.
Approach to stimulus and anticipation
SUFF ASSUMP
We should spend most of our time solving for the missing info we need. Most of the time we're missing a bridge idea, so we should also anticipate that this "if X, then Y" type idea might be worded in contrapositive form in the correct answer.
ID THE CONCLUSION
We should bracket off the conclusion in the stimulus and then just look for whichever answer choice is equivalent in meaning to what's in the brackets.
DETERMINE THE FUNCTION
Once we've found the Main Conclusion, we should read the question stem again and see which claim they were asking about ... we can prephrase which role it played by picking between MAIN CONCLUSION, SUPPORTING, OPPOSING, NEUTRAL
STRENGTHEN / WEAKEN
Look for missing links but also make sure to debate the author by arguing for the anti-conclusion. Correct answers to strengthen will often rule out an objection or go the opposite way of an objection. Overall, our prephrase will be less specific here ... "I need SOME important difference between the two things being compared" ... "I need some OTHER WAY to explain that background correlation"
Does that make sense?