Questions based on arguments (Assumption, Strengthen, Weaken, Evaluation, and Flaw) make up over 70 percent of all Critical Reasoning questions, but you will likely run into other question types on Test Day that are not based on arguments.
Explain question stimuli are not argumentative. Rather, they present a seeming discrepancy and ask you to find an explanation for the paradox. Your Paraphrasing skills and Attention to the Right Detail are the key to this question type—in your own simple but accurate words, restate not only the details in the stimulus but also the nature of the apparent contradiction. Once you’ve summed up the nature of the discrepancy, look for an answer choice that explains how the apparently contradictory facts in the stimulus could both be true.
It’s sometimes difficult to predict exactly what the correct answer will contain, since an apparent contradiction can often be resolved in a number of different ways. On questions for which there could be multiple ways for the test maker to phrase the correct answer, predictions must be in the form of characterizing what the right answer will mean or do, not the words it will use. Again, Paraphrasing is crucial.
Here are some example question stems that indicate an Explain question:
Now let’s use the Kaplan Method for Critical Reasoning to solve an Explain question:
Over an extended period of time, the average seawater temperature in a region of an ocean increased by over 1 degree Celsius. During that same time, the average size of the haddock population in the region decreased by more than 25 percent. This observation led scientists to hypothesize that warmer waters favored smaller fish because their bodies were less energy intensive and better able to adapt to the warmer water. However, long-term laboratory experiments showed no changes in the average size of haddock as water temperatures were increased.
Which of the following best explains the differences between the observations in nature and those in the laboratory experiments?
The wording of this stem signals that there were differences between actual observations and the results of laboratory experiments. Your task is to seek a possible explanation for the different results. Any question that asks you to account for a set of potentially contradictory findings is an Explain question.
When untangling the stimulus, paraphrase the given information and make sure you understand the paradox. The findings described in this stimulus seem to be contradictory: average haddock size and water temperature were negatively related in the ocean, leading scientists to form a hypothesis as to why this occurred, but there was no correlation between size and temperature in the laboratory.
There could be many reasons why this happened, so you cannot predict the exact answer here. But no matter how the right answer is phrased, you know that it will concern a difference between the real-world and laboratory environments that is relevant to fish size.
If the spacing of the mesh in fishing nets decreases, that means that relatively large fish that used to be able to escape the nets are now going to be caught and thus be taken out of the general population of haddock. This phenomenon would reduce the average size of the population. This spacing decrease is what (C) describes, so it’s the correct answer.
Remember that for an answer choice to be correct, it must relate logically to the seeming contradiction in the stimulus. The incorrect choices here fail to resolve the paradox. The idea that if different kinds of scientists make the measurements, the results would be different requires an assumption that one or the other group is unlikely to report accurate results, so (A) does not explain the discrepancy. The frequency of the measurements, per (B), would not have any effect on the end results in either environment. Although (D) does not address predators in the laboratory environment, if there were more predators of smaller haddock in the ocean, one would expect the average size of fish there to increase. This is the opposite, or 180 degrees, from what was observed, so it certainly does not explain the discrepancy. (E) describes a variable that was the same in both the ocean and the laboratory, so it cannot explain the different outcomes.