Q16 - To act responsibly in

[vswamy]

Hi all. Could you explain to me why the answer to 16 is C? What is wrong with answer choices B?

B- Mary did make a reasonable effort to ensure the information acquired was accurate and complete and as a result acted responsibly in firing John.

What makes C a better choice than answer choice B?

Any input on this question would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[giladedelman]

Thanks for your post!

Here, the principle can be expressed as a conditional statement. We're told that to act responsibly, one must act on information that one has made a reasonable effort to check. (I'm paraphrasing.) The word "must" introduces a necessary condition. So we can express the conditional like this:

acted responsibly in professional capacity ---> made reasonable effort to ensure completeness and accuracy of information acted on

Notice that this does not allow us to conclude that anyone acted responsibly! We know that if someone doesn't fulfill the necessary condition, that person definitely didn't act responsibly. That's the contrapositive of the conditional statement above. But just because someone does fulfill the condition, that doesn't mean that person acted responsibly -- it's not sufficient to guarantee that.


(C) is correct because Toril didn't make a reasonable effort to make sure the information was complete -- she didn't look into the risks! -- so she couldn't have been acting responsibly.

But (B) is incorrect, right off the bat, because it concludes that Mary acted responsibly. We have no basis to conclude that.

(A) is incorrect for the same reason as (B).

(D) is incorrect because it doesn't tell us anything about whether Conchita did or did not make a reasonable effort to check her information.

(E) is tempting, but the principle is about one's professional capacity. So we have no way to judge someone's vacation planning skills.

Does that answer your question?