PrepTest 122, Section 2, Question 5
Letter to the editor: Middle-class families in wealthy(49 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the letter(10 more words not shown)
- Acriticizes a characteristic(12 more words not shown)
- Btakes failure to(17 more words not shown)
- Cpresumes that a(21 more words not shown)
- Dfails to recognize(12 more words not shown)
- Egeneralizes about the(13 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
A hypocrite can still be right.
Imagine a celebrity flying around in a private jet while telling other people to reduce their environmental impact. I can understand finding that frustrating. The celebrity may be doing more damage than the people being criticized. But does that make the criticism of their lifestyles wrong?
We'd still need to examine what those families do and what environmental harm results. The celebrity's own wastefulness doesn't answer either question. Both lifestyles could be damaging.
What we’re looking for
The letter tells us not to take the criticism seriously because the critic behaves badly. That's the move the flaw question wants us to identify: the author attacks the person making the criticism instead of addressing the criticism itself. We don't have to defend the celebrity's choices to recognize that the argument hasn't answered the environmental concern.
Working the answers
- ACorrect
The letter focuses on the critic's environmentally damaging lifestyle and uses that to dismiss the criticism. But a wasteful celebrity could accurately identify wastefulness in other people's behavior. Showing hypocrisy doesn't show that the argument about middle-class families is mistaken.
- B
This would be a claim about sincerity: the celebrity doesn't really believe what they say because their actions don't match it. The letter doesn't draw that conclusion. It tells us to dismiss the criticism, not to doubt whether the critic sincerely believes it. A person could sincerely hold a belief and fail to live up to it anyway.
- C
The letter doesn't inspect the reasons offered for the environmental criticism and find some of those reasons inadequate. It looks at the critic's lifestyle. C describes a different mistake: treating inadequate support for a view as enough to dismiss that view. Here, the attack never gets to the support in the first place.
- D
We'd need evidence that actually works against the letter's conclusion. The celebrity's wasteful lifestyle doesn't establish whether middle-class lifestyles are environmentally harmful, and it doesn't directly establish that the criticism should be taken seriously. The problem is that this evidence fails to address the criticism, not that it proves the criticism correct.
- E
The letter doesn't use a few people's actions to conclude that everyone behaves the same way. It uses some critics' actions to decide how seriously to take their criticism. Keep the conclusion in view: it is about dismissing an argument, not generalizing about the behavior of all people.
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