PrepTest 157, Section 2, Question 9
Psychologists report that children in nine-month schools typically(67 more words not shown)
The reasoning above is most(6 more words not shown)
- Arelies on an(12 more words not shown)
- Bdraws on an(5 more words not shown)
- Ctakes for granted,(16 more words not shown)
- Dfails to show(21 more words not shown)
- Eclaims to accept(11 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Can't children forget things in a month?
Replacing one long summer break with three shorter breaks doesn't eliminate breaks. Imagine taking May, October, and February off instead of one long stretch. Students still leave school for a month at a time. If that's enough time to forget substantial material, the new schedule could create three periods of learning loss rather than solve the problem.
We don't know that the new schedule would be worse. We also don't know that it would prevent forgetting. The research establishes significant forgetting over summer breaks under the nine-month schedule. It doesn't establish perfect retention during a month away from school.
What we’re looking for
That's the objection we should look for in the flaw answers: the argument assumes that the problem found in the old arrangement won't occur in the new one. Before recommending the change on that basis, it needs to show that the shorter breaks actually avoid the problem.
Working the answers
- A
The conclusion is explicitly limited to academic learning. It doesn't weigh academic learning against other valuable experiences students might have outside school. The gap is whether students would forget their schoolwork under the new schedule, not whether schoolwork matters more than everything else.
- B
A one-month break and a three-month break differ in length. The distinction isn't arbitrary. The question is whether that real difference produces the claimed improvement in memory. Identifying different schedules doesn't itself establish different learning outcomes.
- CCorrect
The two situations are the nine-month schedule with a long summer break and the twelve-month schedule with shorter breaks. The undesirable result is forgetting schoolwork. The argument takes for granted that this result belongs only to the first situation. But students might forget during the one-month breaks too. Naming the schedules and the result makes this abstract description match our concrete objection.
- D
Nothing in the passage gives us a reason to think the psychologists used an unrepresentative sample. If it specified an unusual group and then generalized to everyone, that could matter. Here, even perfectly reliable research about forgetting during long summer breaks would leave the main gap untouched: what happens during one-month breaks? We don't need to challenge the research to challenge the proposed conclusion.
- E
The argument accepts the psychologists' finding about summer learning loss and uses it to recommend a change. It doesn't later deny that finding. The mistake lies in what it assumes about the new arrangement, not in accepting and then rejecting the same view.
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