Q8 - Normally, political candidates send out campaign

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
ID the Conclusion

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: The ads were evidently just testing the POTENTIAL to influence popular opinion.
Evidence: They were too few in number to be genuinely trying to shape popular opinion. Plus, they covered a wide variety of topics, and the campaign spent heavily to measure what effect they had on recipients.

Answer Anticipation:
Many students will be fooled into picking the second sentence as the conclusion, since it's very common on ID the Conclusion questions for the conclusion to follow a "but/yet/however". Use that tendency to your advantage, but don't shut off your brain and pick it automatically.

A conclusion has to be a supported opinion. Is the 2nd sentence an opinion? Sure. Is it supported? No.
Ask yourself, "Why should we believe that the ads were sent to too few people to serve the purpose of influencing popular opinion?"
A supporting answer would sound like "Well because the ads were only sent to 1,000 people, and you need to send to at least 10,000 in order to have any effect on popular opinion."

If we correctly identified the conclusion as the 3rd sentence, then all we need to do is find an answer choice with equivalent meaning.

Correct Answer:
C

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Background / Counterpoint

(B) Premise

(C) YES! This is the 3rd sentence.

(D) Premise

(E) Premise

Takeaway/Pattern: All conclusions on ID the Conclusion will be supported opinions. 98% of the time on these questions, the conclusion appears earlier than the evidence. The 3rd sentence has an opinion indicator: "evidently". The last two claims (in the final sentence) are joined by "and", which indicates they work together to support the previous idea.

#officialexplanation

[calftemo]

Can you please elaborate on how the second sentence serves as a premise? If I read the stimulus with sentence 3 as the conclusion, then sentence 2 seems to be just a red herring, serving no purpose in the reasoning structure of the argument.

I thought that B was the conclusion because it was definitely an opinion, and that C was a premise provided to indicate that Ebsen's ads definitely fell into the category of "campaign material to influence popular opinion" (rather than material sent out for some other purpose since the stimulus says 'normally').

Thanks!

[ohthatpatrick]

There's a background phenomenon here:
Ebsen's campaign sent out ads recently.

The question is WHY? What was the purpose?

The normal explanation would be "the campaign was trying to use the ads to influence popular opinion"

But the author is arguing for a different explanation: "the campaign was using the ads to measure an ad's ability to influence popular opinion"

HIS EVIDENCE:
- the normal explanation isn't plausible (they sent out too few ads to effectively shape popular opinion)

- the ads covered a wide variety of topics and the campaign followed up a ton (presumably to measure what effect those ads had in shaping the opinions of people who read them)


When you're strengthening the idea of a Causal Interpretation, you can do it by
1. Ruling out some OTHER WAY to interpret the background facts
("we can tell that the ads weren't trying to influence popular opinion, since they sent out so few of them")

or by

2. Corroborating the plausibility of the AUTHOR'S WAY
("they tried a wide range of topics and then followed up to measure the ad's effectiveness, so that they can pick which ads are most effective for when they do the ACTUAL, BIGGER mail-out in order to shape popular opinion").

Hope this helps.