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Q7 - The kind of thoughts that keep

by jimmy902o Sun Jul 29, 2012 2:14 pm

i am having a tough time seeing why answer choice D is incorrect, doest it have to be true that the sheep causes sleep?
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Re: Q7 - The kind of thoughts that keep

by maryadkins Wed Aug 08, 2012 10:09 am

The hypothesis here is that if you're PREVENTED from sleeping solely by thoughts, you do XYZ (think about sheep), which does what? Excludes sleep-preventing thoughts. This is different from causing sleep. Keeping something bad out so that something good can happen isn't necessarily the same thing as making that good thing happen. Here's an example: A guard at a bank who stops anyone walking in with a gun prevents people with guns to come into the bank. But does it cause the bank to be safe? Not necessarily. Someone could punch someone else inside, or demand money with another weapon. (Sorry for the morbid example.) The guard just eliminates one cause of danger.

(D) is wrong for this reason.

(A) isn't necessarily true.

(B) isn't either.

(E) is out of scope. We're concerned about what happens before they start sleeping.

Hope this helps.
 
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Re: Q7 - The kind of thoughts that keep

by samuelfbaron Thu Jun 06, 2013 4:18 pm

I would also like to point out that (D) goes beyond the scope of the stimulus by including the word 'whenever', which implies you could be driving your car and thoughts of sheep would put you to sleep!
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Re: Q7 - The kind of thoughts that keep

by WaltGrace1983 Sat Apr 12, 2014 4:46 pm

Agreed ^

In these MBT questions, sometimes just one word can make it completely wrong.

(A) "wide variety" - actually, they just need to be able to imagine sheep. That's it!

(B) "Normally" - maybe they only have a difficult time sleeping every 432 days. This is definitely not "normally" having a difficult time sleeping but the technique for sleep induction could still be effective.

(C) is right because, if we were to negate it, the hypothesis would fall apart: "thoughts of sheep would keep the person awake." If this technique (used for trying to help sleep) would actually keep the person awake, how can the technique be "an effective method of inducing sleep." It is completely counter-intutive! This is why (C) is right.

(D) "Whenever" - as noted above, it doesn't have to be whenever. It doesn't even need to be EVERY time someone does this when trying to SLEEP. To be effective, it just needs to be effective at a certain time, not whenever.

(E) "Dreams" - we don't need to know anything about dreams. We are talking about going to sleep; we don't care about what happens after sleep happens
 
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Re: Q7 - The kind of thoughts that keep

by davidmlee4 Thu Jan 26, 2017 3:19 pm

WaltGrace1983 I think it is very misleading to tell any other readers who see your response to try and answer this question by "negating" the answer choices, which would correctly apply to necessary assumption questions. However, in this case, this question should be treated as an inference/must be true question. So the negating technique would not be applicable.
 
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Re: Q7 - The kind of thoughts that keep

by SJK493 Tue Aug 14, 2018 3:38 am

maryadkins Wrote:The hypothesis here is that if you're PREVENTED from sleeping solely by thoughts, you do XYZ (think about sheep), which does what? Excludes sleep-preventing thoughts. This is different from causing sleep. Keeping something bad out so that something good can happen isn't necessarily the same thing as making that good thing happen. Here's an example: A guard at a bank who stops anyone walking in with a gun prevents people with guns to come into the bank. But does it cause the bank to be safe? Not necessarily. Someone could punch someone else inside, or demand money with another weapon. (Sorry for the morbid example.) The guard just eliminates one cause of danger.

(D) is wrong for this reason.

(A) isn't necessarily true.

(B) isn't either.

(E) is out of scope. We're concerned about what happens before they start sleeping.

Hope this helps.



For your explanation above, I would like to point out that the question is 'According to the hypothesis, for a person to use counting imaginary sheep as an effective method of inducing sleep, which one of the following must be true?' So to clarify, the author refers to counting sheep as an effective method, not something that will necessarily induce sleep?