Lesson: Critical/Logical Reasoning - 02

Introducing Arguments

"Did not!" "Did too!" "Did not!" "Did too!"

Perhaps this is what comes to mind when you hear the word "argument," but this type of common grade-school (or political candidate) exchange has nothing in common with arguments on graduate standardized tests. For our purposes here, think of an argument as any piece of text where an author puts forward a point of view, and attempts to support it with a set of ideas.

In your Reasoning section, you'll be given an argument as a stimulus, followed by a question stem asking you to do one of several tasks, such as: strengthen or weaken the argument, identify the author's assumption, identify a flaw in the author's logic, recognize an argument's structure, and so on. Let's start at the beginning, by looking at how arguments are put together.