Q5

[megm7267]

A little help on #5? I was able to figure out 1-4, but had some difficulty with #5. Thanks

[giladedelman]

Thanks for posting! These "rule equivalency" questions can be tricky. Our job is to pick a rule that, if you swapped it in for the existing rule, would lead us to the exact same setup of the game.

In this case, we're looking for a rule that gives us the same thing as "Hamadi cannot be appointed to the same court as Perkins," i.e., H and P can't be together.

(A) doesn't do it for us because they could still be on the trial court together.

(B) is out because this says they can't be on appellate together, but again, they could be together on trial.

(C) only says they can't both be with J, but they could still be together without J.

(D) only splits up H and P if we know H is on appellate. Again, they could both go on trial.

So that leaves us with (E): you can't have any three of H, K, L, and P on the same court. Well, that gets the job done, because since we already know L is on appellate and K is on trial, what this really tells us is that you can't stick H and P together on either court. So it's the exact same information, expressed differently; this is the correct answer.

Does that help?

[NatalieC941]

I am confused by this justification for B below:

"(B) is out because this says they can't be on appellate together, but again, they could be together on trial. "


Don't you mean that they can't be on trial together, but that they could be on APPELLATE together in this conditional?

Looking for clarification, thanks!

[andrewgong01]

I am confused by this justification for B below:

"(B) is out because this says they can't be on appellate together, but again, they could be together on trial. "


Don't you mean that they can't be on trial together, but that they could be on APPELLATE together in this conditional?

Looking for clarification, thanks!

If H not trial then P trial ; i.e. If H is in Appealete ("In") then P is in Trial (Out)
The contrapositive is : If P is IN (appellate) then H is out (Trial)

This rule ensures that at least one of H or P is "out" in trial. In other words it creates a placeholder since no matter how you arrange it one of the two must be 'out' in trial. In a more traditional In/Out Game setting with a logic chain this creates the H/P placeholder in the Out Slot; this means you can't have both H and P in but you can have both of them out. Hence this is why both could be in trial together and not both in appellate because if you put both in the appellate you can not satisfy the placeholder.

A different approach is based of the rule "If H not trial then P trial" and then seeing what happens if H is in trial. In that event - H in trial- this conditional is 'useless' and tells us no restrictions on P because the contrapositive tells us what happens when P is in appellate and the original tells us H in appellate. On the contrary though if H is not in Trial P is restricited and we can see that this rule does force at least one of the two in trial, making it impossible to ever have two in appellate.

When I did this problem earlier this week it was by this same placeholder and conditional idea that a lot of the other choices could be eliminated.

[CharlesS800]

This question tripped me up, both while taking a PT and during review.

I struggle with unconditional questions but after taking a bit more time to review this particular question, I think its bark is worse than its bite.

I began redoing this question by slowly looking over the answer choices.

I quickly eliminated A because it says nothing about both being appointed to trial court, which would be against the original H/P rule from the game.
I got ride of answer choice B because its involvement of element J, something not originally present in the first H/P rule. This elimination was done quickly and just to make sure, I went back after looking over all the answers and considered if H & P could still be appointed to the same court, even with the rule in play. And they can! So, this answer choice is definitely gone. D is incorrect because H could just be placed on the trial court and so could P, wrecking the H/P rule. This left me with D, which I will admit, I originally eliminated, I think mostly because of its involvement of L/K. But this was, obviously, wrong. I should have been more careful when evaluating this answer because I forgot that L/K are already locked into position, leaving only H/P to float around. When you realize this, it is clear that they cannot be together, which would be in line with the original rule, proving D to be the right answer.

Big takeaways from this question for me: sometimes it may be worthwhile to consider an unconditional question, if not only just for 10-15 seconds, to determine whether or not it would require a great deal of work and not simply, as in this case, considering your existing diagram and a few simple rules that can be easily mapped out. It is also important to note when and pay attention to static elements like L/K and not forget them when evaluating questions.