This is an NA question.
The argument begins with a pretty long sentence that turns out to be just context. It tells us similarities between the “chorus” in a play and the “narrator” in a novel. They share many similarities. Both introduce a point of view untied to other characters. Both allow the author to comment on the characters’ actions and to introduce other information.
With the word “however,” we transition from context to argument. And it’s a simple argument with one premise and one conclusion. The premise is that the chorus sometimes introduces information inconsistent with the rest of the play. The conclusion is that the chorus is not equivalent to the narrator.
What’s the missing link? It’s a premise-to-conclusion bridge. We have to assume that the narrator never introduces inconsistent information.
This is what Correct Answer Choice (D) provides. It says that information introduced by a narrator can never be inconsistent with the rest of the information in the novel. That’s it. And with this assumption, the argument is valid. This is an example of where a necessary assumption is also a sufficient assumption. This tends to happen when the argument structure is simple and therefore there is only one assumption to bridge the premise to the conclusion.
Answer Choice (A) is attractive. It says the narrator is never deceptive. This sounds necessary, right? Because the premise said the chorus was deceptive and so in order for the narrator to not be equivalent with the chorus, it must be that the narrator is never deceptive. But no, this isn’t necessary. The premise just said that the chorus sometimes introduces information that’s inconsistent with the rest of the play. That doesn’t mean the chorus is being deceptive. We’re projecting intent onto the chorus without evidence. Maybe they’re trying to deceive. Maybe they’re trying to help us see through the deception of a character in the play. The chorus is telling the truth to the character’s lies. So no, (A) is not necessary. The narrator can be deceptive and the conclusion can still follow that the narrator is not equivalent to the chorus.
This also explains why Answer Choice (E) is unnecessary. (E) claims that authors sometimes use choruses to mislead audiences.
Answer Choice (B) says the voice of a narrator is sometimes necessary in plays that employ a chorus. What? Get out of here with this basic BS. This is just a mish-mash of ideas from the stimulus. There’s no reason why a play that employs a chorus must also employ a narrator.
Answer Choice (C) claims that information necessary for the audience to understand the events in a play is sometimes introduced by the chorus. No, this isn’t necessary. Let’s say that all the information introduced by the chorus is “extra” information: nice to have but not required for the audience to understand the play. What impact would that have on the argument? Not much. The narrator can still be not equivalent to the chorus as long as the narrator does what (D) says.
This is an NA question.
The stimulus opens with context that the premises call upon with a referential phrase. To establish a human colony on Mars, it requires the presence of a tremendous quantity of basic materials on Mars. And then we need to assemble those materials. The premise states that the costs of transporting those materials through space would be very high. Therefore, the argument concludes that it wouldn’t be economically feasible to establish a colony on Mars.
The assumption is that the costs in the premises are a consideration that matters. What are those costs again? Costs of “transporting material through space.” Now, why would we need to transport materials through space? Because a Martian colony requires a tremendous amount of basic materials. But again, why must we transport that “tremendous amount of basic materials” through space? The assumption is that those materials cannot be found on Mars.
This is absolutely necessary for the premises to even matter to the conclusion. This is what Correct Answer Choice (E) says. That Mars isn’t a practical source of the basic materials required for establishing human habitation there. If Mars were, then there’d be no need to transport those materials through space.
(E) seems pretty obvious once you get there. But the hard part is in getting past the other trap answers.
Answer Choice (A) is one such trap. It uses “only if” to lay out a necessary condition for establishing human habitation on Mars: the decrease in cost of transporting materials from Earth to Mars. This sounds good but it isn’t necessary. First, note that the conclusion didn’t claim that it would be physically impossible to colonize Mars. Rather, just that it would be economically infeasible. Economically infeasible means highly unlikely, but it doesn’t mean impossible. Economic constraints are softer than physical or technological constraints. Economic constraints are a matter of collective resource allocation. Physical or technological constraints are imposed by what knowledge we have access to. Second, note that the premises cited the costs of transportation through space. Surely Earth to Mars is through space but so is the moon to Mars. And so is the asteroid belt to Mars. If the materials aren’t even coming from Earth in the first place, then why should we care about the transportation costs of Earth to Mars?
Answer Choice (B) is another trap. It says that the cost of transportation through space (note already the improvement upon (A)) isn’t expected to decrease in the near future. Again, this sounds good. Don’t we need the costs to not decrease? Well, first notice that (B) isn’t about what will actually happen to the costs. It’s about what we expect to happen to the costs. We don’t need expectations to point in any particular direction. We need actual costs to not decrease. Second, even if actual costs decrease in the near future, the argument can still survive as long as the costs don’t decrease too much. For example, imagine if the costs decrease by 0.01%. That’s presumably not enough of a decrease to make a difference. In order to hurt the argument, we need to have the costs decrease to the point of being economically feasible to transport enough basic materials to Mars.
Answer Choice (C) claims that Earth is the only source of basic materials necessary for a Martian colony. This is a classic Strengthen answer in an NA question. If (C) were true, then that definitely helps the argument. Earth is the only source of raw materials and therefore, to get those materials to Mars, we must transport them through space. But this isn’t necessary. What if one of Mars' two moons had the requisite materials? That would still require transportation through space and so the argument would still survive. (C) isn’t necessary.
Answer Choice (D) says that no significant benefit would result from establishing a human colony on Mars. This isn’t necessary. The argument didn’t express a value judgment. It wasn’t about the pros and cons of establishing a Mars colony or whether we should do it. It was just an argument about the costs and economic feasibility of such an endeavor. (D) is not only unnecessary, it is also irrelevant.
This is an NA question.
This is a very difficult argument to understand substantively. Let’s first approach this question by breaking it up into its parts. Conveniently, it progresses in order from minor premise to major premise to main conclusion. The two conclusion indicator words “thus” and “therefore” help us recognize this.
There may be a way to get to the right answer without fully understanding the argument substantively, but I wouldn’t bank on it. You’ll have to pick up in the main conclusion the new reference to “other characteristics.” What other characteristics? We’ve only talked about a star’s brightness. So the “other characteristics,” whatever they may be, had better be determinable.
If you picked up on that, then you’re probably down to Answer Choice (B) and Correct Answer Choice (D). The problem with (B) is that it’s too specific and hence unnecessary. We don’t need “differences in the elements each is burning” to be detectable from Earth. We just need some difference to be detectable from Earth, like how (D) has it.
Okay, but let’s back up and try to actually understand this argument.
The minor premise tells us that the distance between Earth and a distant galaxy overwhelms the distance between Earth and any object in that distant galaxy. Imagine you’re on a tiny island and we’re trying to measure the distance between you and two people on a different faraway tiny island. They’re not equidistant from you. One of them is actually closer, because, say, one is standing at the shore and the other is standing on the other side of the island. But the first sentence is saying that the distance between the two islands is so vast that that’s the only thing that really matters. The islands themselves are so small and the vast space between the islands so large that it hardly matters where anyone is standing on their islands. That difference is so small that it’s negligible.
So it follows that if two stars are in the same distant galaxy (two people on the same distant island), then the distance between those two stars to Earth will in effect be the same (because whatever difference is negligible). But if we still observe a difference in their brightness, that difference can’t be due to their (negligibly different) distance. It must be due to their actual brightness as in how bright they’re actually burning and not just how bright they appear to be.
Now the argument reaches for its main conclusion. It concludes that we should be able to figure out the correlation between two stars' relative actual brightness and the two stars’ other characteristics. We see “other characteristics” appear out of nowhere. We did talk about brightness and how if two stars are in the same distant galaxy, we can in effect treat them as being equidistant from Earth in terms of their brightness. But in order to correlate their brightness with “other characteristics,” we first have to be able to detect and measure those “other characteristics.”
Again, this is what Correct Answer Choice (D) picks up on. It says that there are stars in distant galaxies that have characteristics, other than brightness, discernible from Earth. This must be true. If this were false, that would mean that we could discern only a distant star’s brightness and nothing else. If that’s true, then we would be unable to correlate brightness with anything else.
Note that (D) doesn’t care to specify what the “characteristics” are. That’s good because the conclusion didn’t care to specify either. This is what makes Answer Choice (B) unnecessary. While (B) would certainly strengthen the argument, we don’t need the differences in the elements each is burning to be detectable from Earth. Who knows what “other characteristics” the conclusion wanted to correlate with brightness? Maybe it’s the elements that each is burning. Maybe it’s the color of the stars, their size or mass, or their temperature. It could be any of those characteristics that need to be detectable from Earth.
Answer Choice (A) says that if two stars are in two different galaxies... Eh, we can stop. We don’t care. The argument cares about two stars in the same distant galaxy. (A) talks about two stars in two different (near or far?) galaxies. Whatever else (A) is about to say for these two stars will be irrelevant so you should move on to the next answer.
But for review, we can negate this and see that it has no impact on the argument. So what if it is possible to determine their distances from Earth? That doesn’t hurt the argument.
Answer Choice (C) is similarly irrelevant for it talks about stars in our own galaxy. Again, for the same reasons as in (A), we don’t care. We should move on.
If we negate (C), that’s just fine for the argument. It would be absolutely bizarre if all the stars in the Milky Way were all approximately the same distance from Earth but it wouldn’t affect the argument.
Answer Choice (E) can also be similarly eliminated as soon as you see that it’s talking about stars that are significantly different in distance from Earth. The argument contemplated two stars that are not significantly different in distance from Earth. That’s what the sub-argument established by placing the two stars in distant galaxies to begin with. We should move on.
(E) goes on to say that if there are significant differences in how far away two stars are from Earth, then those stars will differ significantly in apparent brightness. This isn’t required. It’s fine for the argument if two stars of significant difference in distance from Earth are about the same in brightness. The argument contemplated two stars of insignificant difference in distance but significant difference in brightness. After all, a major assumption of the argument is that distance is only one factor in determining a star’s brightness.
This is a PSA question.
The argument begins with the conclusion that some of the rare pygmy bears should be moved from their native island to the neighboring island. Naturally, we wonder why. The rest of the argument supplies the premises. First, we learned that they are at risk of extinction owing to habitat loss. Second, we learned that the neighboring island is the only place that has a similar habitat. Hence, moving them is the only viable chance of saving them from extinction. That's a sub-conclusion/major premise. The main conclusion is the first sentence. We should move them.
This PSA question is just like most other PSA questions. The argument presents a P and arrives at a C. Our job is to find in the answers a P → C rule or bridge.
We can say something like if an action is the only viable method of saving an endangered species, then we should take that action. Keep in mind that PSA answers can be stated very specifically or very generally. Overinclusiveness is not a problem for this question type.
Correct Answer Choice (C) gets the job done. It says if a species is in danger of extinction, whatever is most likely to prevent the extinction should be undertaken. The premises trigger the sufficient condition because the rare pygmy bears are explicitly said to be at risk of extinction. The conclusion satisfies the necessary condition. Moving them to the neighboring island is the only viable chance and therefore it is the most likely way to prevent extinction. Therefore, it should be undertaken.
Answer Choice (B) can be eliminated on the basis of its logic alone, as is commonly the case for wrong answers on PSA questions. It says rare animals should not be moved from one habitat to another unless these habitats are similar to one another. This stipulates a necessary condition on the movement, not a sufficient condition on the movement. That's a problem for us because the conclusion wants to move these animals. Do the Group 3 translation on the logical indicator “unless.” If the habitats are not similar to one another, then the animals should not be moved. Satisfying the sufficient condition here only allows us to draw the conclusion that these animals should not be moved.
Answer Choice (E) can be eliminated because it's too weak. It's better than (B) in the sense that there is no logical issue. It says if an animal's original habitat is in danger of being lost, then it is permissible to try to find a new habitat for the animal. That's fine, the premises satisfy the sufficient condition, which allows us to draw the conclusion that it is permissible to try to find a new habitat for the pygmy bears. But that doesn't mean we should do it. Permissible doesn't imply should. This is too weak.
Answer Choice (A) says some species are more deserving of protection than other species. This is a truism. Which species are more deserving of protection than others? We don't know. Even if we did, what manner should the protection take? Again, we don't know.
Answer Choice (D) says the rarer a species of plant or animal is, the more that should be done to protect that species. This allows us to draw conclusions about preservation priorities. If we know that the rare pygmy bear is rarer than, say, the panda bear, then according to (D), we should afford priority and do more to protect the pygmy bears. But how is this relevant to the argument? We’re not concerned about whether we're doing too much or too little for the pygmy bears in comparison to some other endangered species.
This is a Most Strongly Supported question.
The stimulus provides two different types of information. First, we’re given a correlation, which turns out to be useless. Second, we’re given a logical chain, which is what produces the inference.
The correlation is that darker honey tends to be higher in antioxidants than lighter honey.
The next piece of information, even though it's still in the same sentence, expresses a different relationship. It says that all of the most healthful strains of honey are unusually high in antioxidants. The keyword is “all” which the test writers conveniently hid in the middle of the sentence. If you catch that, you can translate this into an all statement using the conditional arrow. The set of “the most healthful strains of honey” is completely subsumed under the set of “honey that's unusually high in antioxidants”:
most healthful → unusually high in antioxidants
Finally, we learned that there are some strains of honey that come from sage nectar and are among the lightest in color, yet are also among the most healthful. This is a “some relationship,” an overlap in two sets. One of the sets is what we've already talked about: the set of the most healthful strains of honey. The other is the set of honey that comes from sage nectar and is lightest in color.
sage and among lightest ←s→ most healthful
We can chain together this “some statement” and the previous “all statement”:
sage and among lightest ←s→ most healthful → unusually high in antioxidants
This is a commonly repeating valid argument form A ←s→ B → C which produces the valid inference A ←s→ C. Translated back into English, some of the lightest strains of honey produced by bees harvesting sage nectar are unusually high in antioxidants. This is what Correct Answer Choice (A) says. Almost. (A) drops “lightest” but that’s fine. If it’s true that some of the lightest sage honey is X, then it’s also true that some sage honey is X.
Answer Choice (B) says most plants produce nectar that results in light-colored honey. This is unsupported. The information in the stimulus is consistent with most plants producing dark-colored honey or light-colored honey.
Answer Choice (C) says light-colored honey tends to be more healthful than dark honey. This is not supported (or actually, a bit anti-supported). All we know is that darker honey tends to be high in antioxidants. We also know that the most healthful honeys are all unusually high in antioxidants. This weakly suggests that it's the antioxidants that are causally responsible for the healthful effects. If we take that to be true, then (C) is actually anti-supported. But we don’t have to because this is just an MSS question and being unsupported is good enough to eliminate this answer.
Answer Choice (D) says certain strains of honey produced by bees harvesting primarily sage nectar are unusually low in antioxidants. This is unsupported. It’s a tempting answer because we know that sage nectar produces “among the lightest strains of honey” and we also know that there is a general correlation between honey being light and it having less antioxidants. But we also have enough information to infer that sage is an exception to the correlation, because we know that sage-produced light honey is among the most healthful strains of honey and we further know that the entire set of the most healthful strains of honey is subsumed under the set of honey that is unusually high in antioxidants.
Answer Choice (E) says the strain of honey that has the highest antioxidant content is a light-colored honey. This is unsupported. It could be true but it also could be false. We only have information in the stimulus about the set of honey that is among the lightest or among the most healthful or is unusually high in antioxidants. We have no information about the specific strains of honey at any of the extremes of those spectrums.
This is a Main Conclusion question.
This argument is pretty straightforward though quite strange in terms of its content.
The stimulus starts with the conclusion. It says the widespread use of encryption software will bring the writing of biographical history virtually to an end. First, how strange the content is, right? It's just a weird statement that encryption software's wide adoption will bring an end to biographies. Second, the presence of an interjected phrase to explain what encryption software means adds complexity to the grammar and is totally unnecessary. I’m talking about the stuff between the commas. What is encryption software? It makes electronic documents accessible by password only. Seriously? Who didn't already know that?
Anyway, we should rightly be wondering why encryption software would result in the extinction of the biography. The rest of the stimulus makes an attempt to support the conclusion. It’s a terrible argument but we don't need to go there.
We are told that public figures' private correspondences and diaries are intended to be confidential when they are written, but later they become biographers' principal sources. But in the future, most of those private correspondences and diaries will be encrypted, which means that the most interesting revealing material will be unavailable to biographers, unless the biographers have the passwords.
So that's the argument. One assumption is that biographers will not have passwords and therefore will not gain access to the most interesting source material. And that's why the author concludes there will be no more biographies. I am really resisting the urge to tear this argument apart because it's so awful. But again we don't need to because this isn’t a Weaken or Strengthen question. So, let's look at the answers.
Answer Choice (A) is a premise of the argument.
Correct Answer Choice (B) accurately paraphrases the conclusion. “Decline significantly or cease” is a good paraphrase for “bring...virtually to an end.”
Answer Choice (C) is an assumption that the argument makes that we noted above.
Answer Choice (D) is supported by information from the stimulus. In other words, if this were an MSS question, then this would be a correct answer, on the back of a fairly reasonable assumption that the private correspondences and diaries are the most interesting and revealing material.
Answer Choice (E) is also an assumption that the argument makes, as noted in (D) above. This is a more subtle assumption than what (C) pointed out.
This is a Fill in the Blank question.
The stimulus provides additional information about what we’re supposed to fill the blank in with. We’re looking for a conclusion. The blank sits in a sentence structured with the word “since.” “Since something, blank.” The “something” is the premise and the “blank” is the conclusion. That means this is like a type of MSS question where information in the stimulus builds up to support a conclusion hiding in the answer choices.
The sociologist starts her argument by presenting OPA. The other people are anthropologists. They claim that cultures can most effectively respond to the threat of cultural decay by replacing or abandoning many of their traditions so that other traditions may endure. With the word “but,” the author switches from context to her argument. With the word “since,” she introduces her first and only premise that each tradition in a culture is essential to that culture's identity. Therefore, OPA’s strategy is… fill in the blank.
Before looking at the answers, we should have a general anticipation of where the argument is going. We can do this because the entire stimulus is building towards something. So we need to understand how OPA relates to the author's premise. What was OPA’s strategy again? It tells a culture attempting to stave off decay to replace its traditions with other traditions. But the author says each tradition is essential to a culture. What, then, does it mean to replace components that are essential to a culture?
Correct Answer Choice (B) tells us. It means that OPA's strategy will achieve the opposite of its intended effect. It will ensure the elimination of a culture rather than prevent its decay.
You might want to object that cultures could survive the elimination of their traditions even if each of its traditions is essential. But that misses the point. We're not actually trying to resolve the question of whether this argument commits a part-to-whole flaw. We're not actually trying to figure out whether a culture is more than just the collection of its traditions. Rather, we are only trying to understand the argument from the author's perspective. We are only trying to figure out where her premise is leading. So even if you don't think (B) provides a strongly supported conclusion by some absolute standard, you must recognize nonetheless that it most logically completes the argument. That’s a relative standard. Look at the other four answers and you’ll see that they are terrible.
Answer Choice (A) says OPA's strategy can save those cultures capable of reflecting on their customs and envisioning alternatives. This is wrong because it's pretty much the opposite of what the author actually wants to conclude. Were this the conclusion the author was trying to argue for, her premise would make no sense. Why point out that each tradition is essential to a culture? OPA just said that these traditions are to be eliminated. You’d do better to point out that these traditions are not essential.
Answer Choice (D) says OPA's strategy constitutes the most effective response to the threat of cultural decay. This is very similar to (A).
Answer Choice (E) says OPA's strategy can succeed if adopted by cultures whose traditions have been adopted only recently. First, this is in the wrong direction as we've already established with (A) and (D). The author isn't trying to argue that OPA's strategy is conducive to success. Second, there's nothing in the argument that suggests the timing of when a tradition was adopted is relevant. What is the important difference between a recent tradition versus an ancient tradition? Nothing, as far as the stimulus is concerned.
Answer Choice (C) says OPA's strategy can be implemented by all and only those cultures studied by anthropologists. This is a bizarre claim in and of itself. This claim acts like there's something special about being studied by anthropologists. Like if a culture was ignored by anthropologists then it's limited in what it can do for itself, whereas if a culture was noticed by anthropologists then the strategies it can implement expand. That's weird. You would think that what a culture can or cannot do doesn't depend at all on whether it's being studied by anthropologists.
This is a Fill in the Blank question.
The blank is preceded by the word “therefore,” so we’re looking for a conclusion. That means this is like a type of MSS question where information in the stimulus builds up to support a conclusion hiding in the answer choices.
The author begins with OPA. The other people here are economists. They argue two things in a super long sentence that you have to break into two by noticing the structural indicator words “both” and “and.” First, the economists argue that the higher turnover rate of part-time workers reveals them to be less satisfied with their jobs than full-time workers. Second, the economists argue that part-time, lower-paid workers threaten full-time workers’ job security.
The author begins the transition from OPA to his argument with the word “but.” He says because job efficiency is positively correlated with job satisfaction, companies are unlikely to replace satisfied employees with dissatisfied ones. Before we move into the answers, we have to put this premise together with OPA in order to formulate a general anticipation of where this argument is going. Look again at the economists’ first point. Who are the more satisfied workers? The full-time ones. Put that together with the author's premise that job satisfaction is positively correlated with efficiency and job security. Who are the more efficient workers? The full-time ones. So who has better job security? The full-time ones. That means part-time workers are not likely to be a threat to full-time workers' job security.
This is what Correct Answer Choice (C) says. Dissatisfied part-time workers are unlikely to threaten the jobs of full-time workers. Were this a Method of Reasoning question, we would say that the author uses one of the economists’ points to argue against another of their points.
Answer Choice (A) says full-time workers are likely to lose jobs to part-time workers. This is just the opposite of what the author is trying to argue.
Answer Choice (B) says the companies earning the greatest profits tend to be those that pay their workers the highest wages. There is no information in the stimulus that allows us to draw a connection between a company's profits and the wages it pays its employees.
Answer Choice (D) says the higher turnover rate of part-time workers is only partly caused by their greater job dissatisfaction. If the author cared primarily about teasing out the causal factors of part-time workers' higher turnover rate, then the information about job security between part-time and full-time workers would be out of place. It would have no connection to what (D) thinks is the conclusion. That's one clue that this is not the right answer. Another clue is revealed by asking yourself what the other partial cause of turnover is. Is it job efficiency? But the premise didn't even establish a correlation between efficiency and turnover. It only established a correlation between efficiency and job satisfaction.
Answer Choice (E) says companies generally hire part-time workers only when they are unable to hire full-time ones. Nothing in the stimulus suggests that part-time workers are hires of last resort. There could be many reasons why companies would prefer part-time workers over full-time workers. For example, part-time workers are a better fit for seasonal jobs.
This is a Main Conclusion question.
The argument is pretty straightforward. First we encounter the main conclusion, followed by the major premise, followed by the minor premise.
The main conclusion is that many people who enjoy popular music don't realize that popular music has been used to express religious and political messages. The next sentence begins with “after all,” which is a premise indicator. After all, popular music has repeatedly been adopted by social movements to express their viewpoints. Why? That's answered by the clause following the word “since.” Since (or because) popular music has the potential to contribute to the conversion of nonmembers and to raise morale and express solidarity of the movement's participants.
These claims together support the idea that popular music has been used to express certain political or religious messages. But it doesn’t support very well the idea that “many people who enjoy popular music do not realize” that it has been serving that purpose. Oh well. Our job isn’t to criticize this argument. Rather, it’s just to analyze its structure. We’ve done that and so we should move on to the answers.
Correct Answer Choice (D) says popular music has purposes other than mere entertainment. This is a more general claim than the actual conclusion. The actual conclusion supports this more general claim. If it's true that people who simply enjoy listening to popular music don't realize that popular music has been used to express religious or political messages, then it's true that popular music has purposes other than mere entertainment. Often on Main Conclusion or Main Point questions, we see an answer like this. Given what the other answers say, this is the best of the options. But it’s certainly not the ideal answer choice. An ideal answer choice would have more closely paraphrased the first sentence.
Answer Choice (A) says popular music accounts for the success of social movements. This statement attributes a causal power to popular music that we don't know it has. What we do know from the stimulus is that popular music has the potential to do a lot of things for a social movement, but not all potentials are actualized.
Answer Choice (B) says popular music's entertainment value has been overemphasized. We don't know this is true. We don't know to what degree popular music's entertainment value has been emphasized nor do we know to what degree it should have been emphasized, so we don't know whether it has been overemphasized.
Answer Choice (C) says popular music is the most effective way of converting people to social movements. This is a worse answer than (A). Again, we know popular music is potentially one way to convert people but we don't know if it's even an effective way, not to mention the most effective way.
Answer Choice (E) says popular music has a profound emotional impact on its listeners. Based on the information in the stimulus, we don't know if this is true. Obviously, we know this to be true, but that doesn’t matter.
This is an RRE Except question.
The stimulus describes a phenomenon and four out of the five answers contribute to an explanation. The stimulus starts by defining two psychological profiles. Repressors are people who repress upsetting thoughts and feelings from conscious awareness. Sensitizers are people who are especially attuned to internal states that freely express distress. Now the stimulus gets to the phenomenon. Repressors tend to be less shy and anxious, can better tolerate frustration, and have superior social skills, better grades, and a greater sense of self-esteem compared to sensitizers.
This stimulus didn't bother to prime our expectations. It didn't tell us anything that might invite us to form expectations that the stimulus upsets. So in that sense, it’s different from many RRE questions that do try to present the phenomenon as surprising. But, in any case, whether or not you find a given phenomenon surprising depends more on what assumption we make.
Here, we know four out of the five answers will provide or contribute to an explanation. So we should dive right into the answers.
Answer Choice (A) says repressors are better able than sensitizers to focus on their work and to avoid distractions. This contributes to an explanation of the phenomenon. This gives us a causal mechanism that explains why repressors have better grades, can better tolerate frustration, and perhaps why they have a greater sense of self-esteem: because they can better focus on their work and avoid distractions.
Answer Choice (B) says repressors are less apt than sensitizers to alienate people by expressing their emotions. This contributes to an explanation of the phenomenon. This gives us a causal mechanism that explains why repressors have superior social skills: by simply refraining from expressing emotions that alienate people.
Answer Choice (C) says parents and other caregivers tend to reward repressors more than they reward sensitizers for academic performance and social behavior deemed desirable. This contributes to an explanation of the phenomenon. This gives us a causal mechanism as long as we assume that external reward from parents and other caregivers incentivizes academic performance and pro-social behavior.
Answer Choice (E) says sensitizers tend to focus more than repressors do on the difficulties of succeeding in their projects rather than on factors that are likely to contribute to success. This contributes to an explanation of the phenomenon. This states a causal mechanism that explains the differential grades and the differential sense of self-esteem. Repressors are focused on the right factors, factors that are likely to contribute to their success, whereas sensitizers are focused on the wrong factors.
Correct Answer Choice (D) does not contribute to an explanation of the phenomenon. One way (D) stands out is that its content is nested within the phrase “some psychologists have hypothesized that…” That means we don't know if the nested clause is true. We only know that it's true that some psychologists have hypothesized whatever is in the nested clause. That's a huge disadvantage that (D) suffers in relation to the other answers. At minimum, (D) requires an additional assumption that the other answers don't, that these psychologists are correct in their hypothesis.
But this is not the only weakness in (D). Even if we edit this answer choice to strip it of its nesting clause, it still wouldn't provide an explanation. The edited version of (D) would say that the desire to maintain social and academic success and self-esteem strengthens repressors’ tendency to repress upsetting thoughts and feelings. This might serve as an explanation for why repressors repress upsetting thoughts and feelings in the first place: because they want to maintain success and self-esteem. But we weren't asked to explain why repressors repress. We were asked to explain why repressors enjoy certain advantages academically, psychologically, and socially that sensitizers don't enjoy. This edited version of (D) does not contribute to an explanation.