Q24 - All unemployed artists

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Inference (which answer must be true based on claims above)

Stimulus Breakdown:
Two conditionals:
1. Unemployed artist --> sympathetic to social justice
2. Employed artist --> not interested in personal fame.

Answer Anticipation:
We read Inference paragraphs looking for Conditional, Causal, Quantitative, or Contrast language. If we have multiple conditionals, we should see if they chain together.

There is an overlapping idea in both sentences: "whether or not you're an employed artist".

Chaining the two claims together we get:
interested in personal fame --> unemployed artist --> sympathetic to social justice.
contrapositive:
unsympathetic to social justice --> employed artist --> not interested in personal fame.

We would expect an answer to reward us for chaining those, so it will probably connect whether or not someone is sympathetic to social justice with whether they are interested in personal fame. Beware illegal negations/reversals.

Correct Answer:
A

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Cool! This rewards us for chaining them together.

(B) This says "not interested in fame --> sympathetic to social justice". That link is not in either of our chains.

(C) This says "unemployed artist --> interested in fame". That's backwards.

(D) This says "sympathetic to social justice --> unemployed arist". Backwards.

(E) This says "artist --> sympathetic to social justice or interested in fame". No way to get that from our two chains.

Takeaway/Pattern: This is a pretty medium level question for the back end of the section. Like most "must be true" Inference questions, it involves conditional logic, so as long as we know how to diagram and connect conditional statements, we're good here. "No A's are B's" = "All A's are ~B's"

#officialexplanation

[chhigg]

I am not seeing how A is the correct answer. I do see why the other answer choices are incorrect. Any help is very appreciated.

[HughM388]

Patrick, your explanation is, as usual, superb; but I have a quibble with the problem itself.

We know that being an unemployed artist makes you sympathetic to social justice and, equally, that employed artists are uninterested in great personal fame. I suppose it's fairly clear where the problem wants us to go, but we really can't conclude, by contrapositive, that being unsympathetic to social justice makes you an employed artist. We can only infer that if you're not sympathetic to social justice that you aren't an unemployed artist. That means you could be a fireman or a baker or, of all things, a lawyer—but not that you're an employed artist. The same goes for the other conditional relationship.