PrepTest 47, Section 2, Question 26
Researchers gave 100 first-graders after-school lessons in handwriting. They found that those whose composition skills had improved the most had learned to write letters the most automatically. This suggests that producing characters more automatically frees up mental resources for other activities.
Researchers gave 100 first-graders after-school lessons in handwriting. They found that those whose composition skills had improved the most had learned to write letters the most automatically. This suggests that producing characters more automatically frees up mental resources for other activities.
Researchers gave 100 first-graders after-school lessons in handwriting. They found that those whose composition skills had improved the most had learned to write letters the most automatically. This suggests that producing characters more automatically frees up mental resources for other activities.
Researchers gave 100 first-graders after-school lessons in handwriting. They found that those whose composition skills had improved the most had learned to write letters the most automatically. This suggests that producing characters more automatically frees up mental resources for other activities.
Which one of the following, if true, most strengthens the argument?
Among the first-graders who received the after-school lessons in handwriting, those who practiced the most learned to write letters the most automatically.
The first-graders who wrote letters the most automatically before receiving the after-school lessons in handwriting showed the greatest improvement in their composition skills over the course of the lessons.
Over the course of the lessons, the first-graders who showed greater improvement in their ability to write letters automatically also generally showed greater improvement in their composition skills.
Before receiving the after-school lessons in handwriting, the 100 first-graders who received the lessons were representative of first-graders more generally, with respect to their skills in both handwriting and composition.
Among the first-graders who received the lessons in handwriting, those who started out with strong composition skills showed substantial improvement in how automatically they could write letters.
Explanations
Talk about a clunky argument—very typical of late-section LR questions. Let's make sense of this argument.
The author notes a correlation in the results of this research—most improved writing was linked to the greatest ability to write letters automatically (whatever that means). Then they conclude that this correlation suggests automatic letter production must free up mental resources, essentially conflating that freeing-up of resources with improving composition.
Word salad nonsense.
It's a Strengthen question, so our job is to make it more their conclusion—that automatic character production must mean more mental resources are freed up—more likely to be true.
Let's see.
Nah. Cool story, bro. But this doesn't help me better prove a connection between a greater capacity for automatic letter writing and the freeing up of mental resources.
Nope. This could weaken, actually, because the kids who had the greatest automatic letter writing prior to the lessons might not have been the ones with the strongest automatic letter writing when the lessons ended.
Yeah, this works. It's not great, but it reaffirms the alleged correlation and relates freeing up mental resources back to composition skills. In other words, this strengthens because it doubles down on a premise.
Nah. This is more or less a necessary assumption of the argument, but we have 100 kids, so this was fair game to leave unstated. This doesn't help us understand whether or not there's a positive correlation between automatic letter writing and the freeing up of mental resources.
Nope. This gets things backwards. Great—the already-talented writers improved how automatically they could write letters, but what does that tell me about their freed up mental resources? If anything, this suggests that those first-graders who had the freest mental resources prior to the lessons had the greatest capacity for improvement in automatically writing letters.
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