PrepTest 119, Section 3, Question 7
Numerous books describe the rules of etiquette.(57 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the argument(11 more words not shown)
- Areaches a conclusion(16 more words not shown)
- Bbases a generalization(12 more words not shown)
- Cfails to justify(12 more words not shown)
- Doverlooks the possibility(18 more words not shown)
- Eattempts to lend(14 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Does calling a behavior rude mean claiming it's rude everywhere?
An etiquette book can classify conduct as polite or rude. The author treats that as a claim to a single objective standard, then objects that politeness varies across cultures. I'm not convinced that writing down judgments automatically makes the broad claim the author attacks.
What we’re looking for
I also wouldn't assume that cultural variation alone settles every possible question about objective standards. But we don't need to solve that larger debate to identify a problem in this argument. For the flaw question, let's examine what the books are actually being accused of claiming. An answer needs to expose an unsupported step, not merely announce that the author's conclusion sounds too strong.
Working the answers
- A
The conclusion concerns whether it is reasonable to label behavior correct or incorrect. It doesn't predict how people actually behave based on rules telling them what to do. The answer describes a move from advice to conduct that the argument doesn't make.
- B
The passage says what etiquette authors usually do; it doesn't describe a small selection of books and then generalize from that sample to every book. Nothing in the stated reasoning establishes the particular few-authors-to-all-books jump B alleges.
- C
Whether etiquette rules influence people's behavior is a separate question. Readers could obey the books, ignore them, or never encounter them, and we would still have the author's argument about whether their classifications are legitimate. The conclusion doesn't depend on a claim about how strongly the books influence conduct.
- DCorrect
The books might be describing what counts as polite within a particular culture. A book of American etiquette, for example, needn't claim that every other culture follows the same conventions.
That makes the author's cultural-variation objection miss its target. Different cultures can have different standards while a book accurately describes the standards of one of them. The author treats any classification as a claim about universal correctness without considering this narrower purpose.
- E
The author does use the word absurd, but that word isn't standing in for the entire argument. The author offers a reason: standards differ across cultures. We should test whether that reason supports the criticism, which is where D exposes the problem. Simply objecting to the dismissive wording doesn't identify the mistaken assumption about what the books purport to do.
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