LR Drill Set 13, Question 8
Competitive figure skaters are judged by panels of(97 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(7 more words not shown)
- AThere is wider(9 more words not shown)
- BCurrently, there is(18 more words not shown)
- CIt is more(15 more words not shown)
- DIt is fairer(12 more words not shown)
- EWithout the discarding(15 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Throwing out the highest and lowest marks is supposed to keep an unusually generous or harsh judge from controlling the result.
I can understand that goal, though I'd still wonder whether every kind of bias disappears. What if several judges share the same bias? Dropping two scores wouldn't necessarily solve that real-world concern. But this question asks what follows from the passage's account, so we need to follow the comparison the author actually makes.
Figure skating counts all the judges' marks. Diving discards the extremes before adding the remaining marks. The author presents that difference as protection against bias and calls diving's system fairer. The number of judges and the six-point versus ten-point scales are also described, but the fairness explanation centers on how the scores are handled.
What we’re looking for
For the inference, I'd expect a claim about greater vulnerability to bias under the system that keeps all the marks. We aren't being asked to design a perfect judging system ourselves.
Working the answers
- A
Judges could agree closely and still share a bias, or disagree honestly without being biased. The passage doesn't compare how much judges in the two sports disagree. It compares a scoring safeguard, so wider disagreement is not established.
- BCorrect
In the author's account, diving has a protection against bias that skating lacks: it removes the highest and lowest scores. The recommendation that skating adopt the fairer method supports the conclusion that the current skating process leaves greater possibility for bias.
This follows the passage's comparison. We don't need to turn it into an independent guarantee that the diving rule eliminates every imaginable biased judgment. We need to recognize the relative risk the recommendation attributes to the two current scoring methods.
- C
This reverses the comparison. The passage presents diving's system as the one with the safeguard and recommends that skating adopt it. It does not identify divers as more likely to receive a biased total score.
- D
The passage mentions different scales without explaining a fairness advantage for ten points over six. Its reason for preferring diving's approach concerns discarding extreme marks. Changing the highest available number isn't the improvement the argument develops.
- E
Removing diving's safeguard would leave it more exposed to extreme scores than it is now. But we aren't told how that hypothetical version of diving would compare with figure skating. The two sports might have different judging patterns. We cannot conclude either greater or equal vulnerability merely from removing the one protection discussed.
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