Q14 - Most popular historical films are not documentaries

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Principle Support

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: Uninformed viewers shouldn't regard dramatic historical films as accurate portrayals of history.
Evidence: Most popular historical films aren't docs, they're dramatic presentations that can't present the evidence for the accuracy of what they're presenting.

Answer Anticipation:
We need to get to a conclusion that's trying to prove "shouldn't regard as accurate portrayal", so the correct answer will give us an if/then rule that says "If xyz is true, then you shouldn't regard as accurate" or it will give us some 'rule of thumb' for how to judge accuracy, and dramatic historical films will perform poorly on that metric. Why does the author think we shouldn't regard dramatic historical films as accurate? Because those films can't present the evidence for the accuracy of what they portray.

So, our if/then prephrase could be "If evidence for accuracy of a portrayal can't be presented, then audience shouldn't regard portrayal as accurate".
A 'rule of thumb' answer could sound like "The less evidence presented in favor of accuracy, the less one should regard a portrayal as accurate".

Correct Answer:
E

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Not even close to being a rule about "shouldn't regard as accurate". This is a rule that says "You SHOULD attempt to provide insights".

(B) This is a rule that says "should be careful". We need one that says "shouldn't regard as accurate".

(C) We could keep this on a first pass, since it's connecting premise language (no evidence presented for the accuracy) to something adjacent to conclusion language. But is "better suited for educational purposes" a fair proxy for the idea we're wanting, "how accurate we should regard the portrayal"? We may have had to live with this if (E) didn't exist and give us a much more explicit lock for the relevant concepts.

(D) This rule is about whether the filmmaker should sacrifice accuracy. We need a rule for whether the audience should regard something as accurate.

(E) YES! Unless = if not, so we can read this as "IF one has NOT considered the evidence on which a historical account is based, then one should not regard that historical account to be accurate". That's a great bridge idea that gets us from Premise to Conclusion.

Takeaway/Pattern: This ended up being a very traditional Principle Support question. The "If Premise, then Conclusion" prephrase (the most common type of correct answer) would serve us well. And the shortcut of only really considering answers that are rules that get you to " ____ ---> Conclusion" would have made it easy to get rid of (A) and (B) and pretty easy to get rid of (C) and (D). Only (E) is giving us a rule that takes the form "If xyz is true, then shouldn't regard as accurate."

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