dan9257 wrote:Hi Dave,
Thank you so much for your help and honestly your posts have been incredibly helpful!!!
I think it would be awesome if you could also give some hot tips on other question types that haven't been covered yet in the thread...! (For example, strengthen, point at issue, resolve the paradox, principle)
Looking forward to your tips
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
In continuing to answer your question, today let's look at Resolution Questions.
Resolution Questions will typically be associated with brief passages that may well
not actually be arguments. Instead, these passages will most often just outline a
puzzling or seemingly paradoxical set of facts. Resolution Questions will ask you to
resolve or to explain that seeming discrepancy.
Like this:
Over the first half of the current season, the New York Yankees have amassed the
worst pitching record in professional baseball. Nevertheless, when asked on
Monday for their predictions, a group of the most widely-respected experts in the
field agreed almost unanimously that the Yankees would win this year’s World Series.
Huh.
Puzzling, no? A real head-scratcher.
But the idea that it's a
paradox just isn't true—it comes from the fact that we (or the
test writers) have
assumed something.
You can think of it like this—if someone were to
suggest to you that the two italicized sentences above were mutually exclusive, how could you
prove that person wrong?
Here’re a few ways you might do so:
1. The Yankees have averaged 16 runs per game so far this year.
2. The group of experts in question spent the weekend at dan9257's house, drowning
in absinthe and covered by a thick fog of opium smoke. As a result, their
cognitive abilities are impaired.
3. Widely-respected experts habitually grossly overstate the chances for the New
York Yankees.
There are multiple other ways a person might resolve that paradox, and none of the
three items above need to be true. None of them would prove much of anything if
they were. But – and this is crucial – if any one of them were true, it would go a long
way toward resolving the strangeness of the Yankees’ poor pitching coupled with the
experts’ grandiose prediction. Any one of them is a legitimate Resolution.
And now, a couple of answer choices that would not help resolve anything:
1. The Yankees’ pitching record is poor only because their starting three pitchers
are all out for the next 6-8 months with various injuries.
2. Usually, most experts tend to agree that the winner of the World Series will be
one of the three or four teams with the best pitching records.
The first option does explain the Yankees’ bad pitching, but it does nothing to
reconcile that fact to the experts’ seemingly odd prediction.
The second option, instead of offering any explanation for the strange coincidence of
facts offered in the passage, just makes things worse. And that’s not cool.
In summation, you can expect three kinds of answer choices for Resolution Questions:
1. Some wrong answer choices that explain why one-half of the passage is true,
but do nothing to resolve the central paradox of the passage (like explaining
why the Yankees’ pitching is bad but not saying why the experts think the
Yanks’ll win the Series).
2. Some wrong choices that will drive the wedge deeper; these bad answers may
deal with both sides of the issue, but in precisely the wrong way.
3. One correct answer that will demonstrate a means by which you can account
for all of the information in the passage.