by ohthatpatrick Mon Aug 05, 2013 12:16 pm
The first thing we try to do with any "inferred/implies/suggests" type question is to use the keywords in the question stem to try to find the answer in the passage.
So I would be looking for where in the passage the author ever talked about English law favoring a substantive interpretation.
Consulting my passage map (my mental model of where things were), I'd think to myself "there's no WAY this is 2nd paragraph, because that didn't even bring up English law, and it's probably not the 1st paragraph because all that said about English law is that it tends towards rules ... formal reasons. Must be 3rd or 4th paragraph."
In the 3rd paragraph, the author never talks about when English law would FAVOR a substantive interpretation, but he does talk about when English law would rule out / ignore any substantive interpretations: lines 42-48 say that when a legal rule "has been clearly established .. application of that rule precludes considering substantive arguments".
So I guess we can infer that English law would consider substantive interpretations when "the legal rule has NOT been clearly established".
(This is the essence of "implies/inferred/suggests" questions ... we find a line reference like "watermelon is my favorite fruit" and pick an answer based off that fact such as "at least one fruit is preferred more than strawberries" .... it's kinda like two sides of the same coin ... "my hair is wet" = "my hair is not dry")
So with my pre-phrase in mind, I'll look at the answer choices for something that sounds like "the legal rule has NOT been clearly established".
(C) looks super juicy!
We can generalize about all the wrong answer choices by saying "they're wrong because they don't reinforce or tie back to any line reference from the passage".
If you're currently diving into these answer choices WITHOUT doing all the stuff I mentioned at the outset, you might be making things harder on yourself.
1. Find the keywords in the passage (or a good paraphrase of them)
2. Read +/- 1 sentence in the passage.
3. Pick an answer that reinforces that window of text
Let me know if you have any questions about this.