PrepTest 146, Section 1, Question 23
A spy fails by being caught, and it(43 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(11 more words not shown)
- AOf those who(28 more words not shown)
- BPeople who are(31 more words not shown)
- CIt is unclear(32 more words not shown)
- DA teacher is(34 more words not shown)
- EBecause someone intervened(34 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
The spies we can study are mostly the ones whose methods failed them. Getting caught exposes the spy and usually exposes the methods. The successful spy stays hidden, so the very thing that makes that spy successful also makes the methods harder for us to learn.
What we’re looking for
That makes sense. The argument isn't claiming that every spy uses bad methods. It's explaining why our information favors one group: failures reveal themselves in a way successes generally don't. For the parallel, I'd look for two kinds of things where we have better access to information about one than about the other.
Working the answers
- A
This distinguishes people who participated in a race from people who didn't, then says participation is required for success or failure. It doesn't explain why observers hear more about one kind of participant than another. Using the words 'succeeded' and 'failed' doesn't reproduce the original's problem of unequal access to information.
- BCorrect
Conscious motives are accessible to the person and can be put into words, so other people can hear about them. Unconscious motives are usually unavailable for that kind of acknowledgment, so we hear less about them. Our information is skewed toward what people can report.
Conscious motives play the role of the caught spies' methods: there is a way for them to become known. Unconscious motives play the role of the successful spies' methods: they tend to remain hidden. The subject matter changes, but the explanation for the imbalance in what we learn is the same.
- C
Here the difficulty is that success hasn't been defined. Give the venture a measurable goal, and we could judge whether it achieved that goal. The spy argument doesn't struggle to define success; it tells us successful spies aren't caught. Its difficulty is learning their methods when they remain hidden.
- D
This compares the sizes of two overlapping categories. Everyone called a teacher teaches, and additional people teach without that title, so the teaching group is larger. That doesn't identify a difference in which group's information becomes available to us. The original concerns what we can learn, not simply which category has more members.
- E
This contrasts an event that occurred with an alternative that didn't occur. It's like asking how history would have unfolded if a major event had gone differently: we don't have that other history to observe. Successful spies, however, do exist in the original argument. They are hard to study because they aren't caught, not because they belong to a hypothetical course of events that never happened.
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