gwd-3-32

giraffe

The answer, I think shall be A.

1. The goal of the government: to reduce crime rate

2. Argument: Courses help reduce the possibility of committing crime again by those released after imprisonment.  In this connetion, obliterating the courses runs counter to the goal of the government.

(Please pay attention to the tense of choice A)

However, there is the possibility that someone makes the decision to commit a crime partly because the condition in prison is comfortable, e.g. free courses are available.  That is to say, if the 'incentive' is undermined, someone might not be a criminal, and this improvement will compensate for the crime rate rise owning to the cancellation of the courses.  Choice A helps rule out the above situation and is thus an valid assumption of the argument.

As for Choice C, even "The group of inmates who chose to take college-level courses were already less likely than other inmates to commit crimes after being released", it by no means indicate that the courses could not further assist them to keep distance from committing crime.  

davidcopper

以下是引用robertchu在2004-7-9 12:09:00的发言：

This is an interesting question.  To effectively solve CR, one must to analyze an argument's line of reasoning(LoR).  Actually there are two arguments here, that of the governor’s and that of the passage author’s.  

LoR of the governor: deny college course --> make prison harsher --> reduce crime rate.
LoR of the author: inmates who take courses will commit fewer crimes after release  --> denying them course will lead to more crimes by them after release --> governor's action won't reduce crime rate.

Since the question ask for assumption of the author’s argument, only the author’s LoR is relevant.

Now let's look at A, which says "Not being able to ... is unlikely to deter anyone from a crime ..." (不能读书不会deter任何人)  You probably can already tell that this is not relevant to the author's LoR (although it's relevant to governor's LoR).  So, choice A is not relevant.  You don’t even needs to try deny test here.

Now let’s look at C.  C says "...inmates who chose to take courses were not already less likely ... to commit crimes after being released."  Deny C, we get "...inmates who chose to take college-level courses were already less likely... to commit crimes after being released."  In other words, denying them course will not lead to more crimes by them after release.  This directly contradicts the author’s LoR and cause the argument to fall apart.  So, C is a necessary assumption of the author.

Two side notes:

Deny test:  "To test whether a statement is necessarily assumed by an author, one can try the denial test (DT): simply deny or negate the statement and see if the argument falls apart.  If it does, the choice is a necessary assumption." -- from Kaplan.

The opposite of A is "Not being able to ... might actually deter some from a crime ..." (不能读书有可能deter一些人).  而不是 “Not being able to ... is likely to deter everyone from a crime ...” (不能读书有会deter所有人).  See the subtle differences between them?

Open to discussion.

这个思路很有新意啊, 谢谢.

我想A可以算是support, 但不是assumption, 因为不是必要条件, 作者说take courses之后是有用的, A说取消take courses的资格是无用的, 是反驳governor的, 但并不影响作者的结论, 因为即使对A取非, 即取消take courses的资格对reduce criminal rate有用, 但是也许take courses之后作用更大. 所以A是support, 不是assumption.

leihuangok

NN的讨论很精彩。

偶刚开始一眼就看中了c,并且坚定的认为不会错，但是看看了NN的讨论，觉得C有点问题，C说“The group of inmates who chose to take college-level courses were not already less likely than other inmates to commit crimes after being released” 我觉得是不是错在这里，按照惯常的“去处它因”思路，如果答案是“被选中的那批人本来（在上课之前）就更少可能犯罪” 就对了吧。