PrepTest 144, Section 2, Question 24

What we’re looking for

Working the answers

• A

  Readers could know in advance that they would enjoy a book, or they could be unsure. Neither possibility settles whether the author can infer something about the book's truth from its popularity. The argument doesn't depend on readers lacking that advance knowledge.

• B

  An author could intend to give pleasure and fail. But the reasoning here begins with a book that supposedly does give pleasure. B discusses what might follow from an intention; it doesn't connect the observed effect back to the intention required by the claim being tested.

• C

  Readers' interest in truth is separate from whether the book is truthful and from why its author wrote it. People could care deeply about accuracy or care very little. The argument doesn't need a particular distribution of those attitudes.

• D
  Correct

  Here is another gap: giving pleasure isn't automatically the same as being written with the intention of giving pleasure. The initial claim concerns the author's purpose. The later reasoning concerns the effect on readers.

  Imagine a serious book that unexpectedly delights readers. Its effect would not establish that delighting them was the author's goal. D rules that possibility out: a book can give readers pleasure only if its author intended that effect. That lets the argument move from pleasure to the author's intention, which is the condition needed to apply the original claim about truth. This is a different link from the sales-and-popularity connection that first caught my attention.

• E

  This would allow other explanations for a book's popularity. That might challenge the author's route from popularity to pleasure; it isn't something the argument must assume to make that route work. The argument needs its chain supported, not an additional way for one of its links to fail.