TARA Critical Thinking practice questions

Cutting library opening hours is not the harmless compromise that councils claim it is. Faced with tight budgets, many councils have chosen to reduce hours rather than close branches outright, arguing that a library open three days a week is better than no library at all. But the hours that disappear are usually evenings and weekends, which are exactly the times when working adults and schoolchildren are free to visit. Visitor numbers then fall, and a few years later the low numbers are held up as proof that the community no longer values its library. In this way, a reduction in hours often turns out to be the first step towards closing a branch altogether.

Which of the following best expresses the main conclusion of the above argument?

When Hartley Museum introduced a £12 entry charge last year, critics predicted that its galleries would be left empty. In fact, the number of visitors fell by only a third. Ticket income more than made up for the drop in voluntary donations, and the museum ended the year with a surplus for the first time in a decade, which paid for a new roof and longer opening hours. The charge has clearly been a success, and other publicly funded museums should follow Hartley's example.

Which of the following is an underlying assumption of the above argument?

A survey of 2,000 people aged over 65 found that those who regularly played a musical instrument scored, on average, noticeably higher on memory tests than those who did not. The difference remained even after the researchers allowed for the participants' level of education. Playing music demands concentration, reading notation and coordinating both hands, so it is easy to see why it would exercise the brain. Anyone approaching retirement who wants to protect their memory should therefore take up an instrument.

Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the above argument?

Rivermouth Town Football Club wants to leave its town-centre ground for a larger stadium on the edge of town. Last month the supporters' forum on the club's website ran an online poll on the move, and 78% of the 1,400 people who voted said no. Fourteen hundred votes is more than many professional opinion polls use, so the result is reliable. The council should therefore recognise that most people in Rivermouth are against the move and refuse planning permission for the new stadium.

Which of the following best describes the flaw in the above argument?

Patients in hospital often sleep badly, and nurses usually blame noise from equipment alarms and night-time checks. St Aldric's Hospital has two surgical wards that treat similar patients for similar operations. Six months ago, one of them introduced 'quiet nights': alarms were turned down, lights were dimmed at 10 pm, and routine checks were grouped together so that patients were woken less often. Since then, patients on the quiet ward have gone home, on average, a day earlier than those on the other ward. Better sleep, it seems, speeds recovery from surgery.

Which of the following, if true, would most strengthen the above argument?

Last year Bramble Coffee introduced a loyalty card: customers who buy nine drinks get their tenth free. Since then, the number of drinks the chain serves each month has risen by 8%, while the number of different customers visiting its cafés each month has stayed almost exactly the same. About half of all drinks are now bought by card holders. Prices have not changed during this time. The chain's managers had hoped that the card would tempt people away from rival cafés.

Which of the following can be safely concluded from the passage above?

Some people argue that blood donors should be paid, since payment would encourage more people to give blood at a time when hospitals are often short of supplies. This proposal should be resisted. Payment tends to attract people whose main motive is the money, and they may be less willing to answer health-screening questions honestly if a truthful answer would cost them the fee. Payment also changes how donors see what they are doing: an act of generosity becomes a transaction, and some people who now give blood freely might stop if they were offered a fee. Besides, shortages can be tackled in other ways, such as holding donation sessions in workplaces and in the evenings.

Which of the following best expresses the main conclusion of the above argument?

Last month the council banned parking on Elm Street between 8 am and 10 am on weekdays. The new signs were put up late on a Sunday night, and on Monday morning dozens of residents who had parked there on Sunday afternoon, as they always did, found parking fines on their windscreens. These fines should be cancelled. When the residents parked, there were no signs and nothing to tell them that the rules had changed. It is wrong to punish people for breaking a rule that they could not reasonably have known about.

Which of the following best illustrates the principle used in the above argument?

Archaeologists excavating a Bronze Age settlement in Cornwall have found fragments of pottery made from a clay that can be traced to a single region of southern Spain. The fragments lay in the same layers as tools from the same period, so they did not find their way into the site at some later date. Cornish tin was highly valued across Europe at the time, and the settlement lies close to several ancient tin workings. It follows that people from this settlement were sailing to southern Spain to trade their tin for goods such as pottery.

Which of the following is an underlying assumption of the above argument?

The Pomona Fruit Society awards its gold medal only to apple varieties that have been grown in its trial orchards for at least five years. This year the new Ember apple has attracted enormous attention from growers, and many judges say it is the finest-tasting apple developed in decades. However, Ember was first planted in the Society's trial orchards just three years ago. So, however good it may be, Ember cannot have been awarded the Society's gold medal this year.

Which of the following most closely parallels the reasoning used in the above argument?

Brookfield's Victorian market hall is in poor repair, and the council must decide its future. The hall has stood empty since its last traders moved out three years ago. Either the council pays £4 million to restore the building, or the hall will be demolished and the site sold for housing. Yet £4 million is far more than the council can find at a time when it is already cutting services for elderly residents. So, however much the people of Brookfield may regret it, the market hall will have to be demolished.

Which of the following best describes the flaw in the above argument?

Two years ago Halden Insurance began allowing its claims handlers to work from home on three days a week. Since then, the average number of claims settled per handler each month has fallen by 12%. The company's managers have concluded that handlers get less done at home than in the office, and from next month all handlers will be required to work in the office five days a week. The managers expect this to bring productivity back to its earlier level.

Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the managers' reasoning?

Now that phones can translate speech almost instantly, some people say that schools should stop teaching foreign languages. They are wrong: language lessons are as worthwhile today as they have ever been. Translation apps are good at conveying the literal meaning of a sentence, but they handle jokes, irony and politeness poorly, and these are often what make the difference between a friendly conversation and an awkward one. Learning another language also teaches pupils how language itself works, which can improve their writing in their own language. And anyone who has tried to chat through a phone passed back and forth between two people will know how much is lost when every remark has to wait for a machine.

Which of the following best expresses the main conclusion of the above argument?

In 2024 the town of Elsby moved its general waste collections from weekly to fortnightly, while keeping weekly collections for recycling. Over the following year, the weight of general waste collected fell by 25% and the weight of recycling collected rose by 10%. Before the change, general waste had made up three-quarters of all the household waste collected in the town by weight, and recycling the remaining quarter. Supporters of the scheme say it has encouraged residents to think harder about what they throw away.

Which of the following can be safely concluded from the passage above?

At Greyfield School, pupils who hand in all of their homework achieve, on average, a full grade higher in their GCSEs than pupils who regularly miss it, and the gap is similar in every subject. Last year about a third of pupils regularly missed homework. The head teacher has therefore announced that, from September, any pupil who misses a homework deadline will be given an after-school detention. Since nearly every pupil will then complete their homework, she expects the school's GCSE results to rise substantially.

Which of the following is an underlying assumption of the above argument?

Five years ago a family of beavers was released into a fenced stretch of woodland on Hollin Beck, a stream that feeds the River Arde. The beavers have since built a series of dams, creating ponds that hold back water after heavy rain and release it slowly. In the five years since the release, the village of Hollinfoot, two miles downstream, has not flooded once, whereas it flooded three times in the previous five years. The beavers' dams must be protecting the village from flooding.

Which of the following, if true, would most strengthen the above argument?

Last week an online retailer listed a television that normally costs £999 at £9.99 by mistake. Within an hour, thousands of orders had been placed, many by people who had shared the listing on social media with comments such as 'Grab one before they notice!' Some of these buyers now insist that the retailer must honour their orders. It should not have to. A promise made by mistake should not bind the person who made it when the people relying on it knew, or obviously should have known, that a mistake had been made.

Which of the following best illustrates the principle used in the above argument?

Last year the county council installed speed cameras at the 20 junctions that had recorded the highest numbers of serious accidents in the previous twelve months. In the year since, serious accidents at those 20 junctions have fallen by 40%, while at the county's other junctions the number has stayed about the same. This shows that the cameras have cut serious accidents by 40%. The council should now install cameras at the next 20 most dangerous junctions, where it can expect a similar improvement.

Which of the following best describes the flaw in the above argument?

Governments increasingly require scientists to state, before they receive a grant, what practical benefits their research will bring. This policy, though well meant, is likely to make the research that gets funded less useful rather than more. Many of the technologies we now rely on grew out of work whose applications nobody could have foreseen: the branch of mathematics that now keeps online payments secure, for instance, was studied for centuries purely for its own sake. Asking researchers to forecast benefits therefore cannot reliably pick out the work that will matter most; it mainly rewards those who are best at writing confident predictions. Worse, it nudges scientists towards safe projects with obvious but modest pay-offs, and away from the open-ended questions that have produced the biggest advances.

Which of the following best expresses the main conclusion of the above argument?

Researchers studying great tits in six European cities found that birds living beside busy roads sang at a noticeably higher pitch than birds of the same species in nearby woodland. The difference appeared in every city studied. Great tits use song both to defend their territories and to attract mates, so being heard matters to them. Traffic noise is mostly low-pitched, and it drowns out low notes far more than high ones. The researchers concluded that the city birds have raised the pitch of their song so that other great tits can hear it above the traffic.

Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the researchers' conclusion?

Most members of the Wexford Walking Club are retired, and a recent survey found that most retired people in the area do some kind of voluntary work. The club's committee has therefore concluded that most of its members must already be volunteers. After all, it says, if most members are retired and most retired people volunteer, then most members must volunteer too. On this basis it has dropped its plan to organise volunteering days, arguing that few members would need the encouragement.

Which of the following most closely parallels the reasoning in the above argument?

Five years ago, the government of a small country introduced a levy on high-sugar soft drinks, charged at a single rate per litre whatever the drink. Since then, the money raised by the levy each year has stayed almost exactly the same. Because the levy is charged per litre, steady revenue means that the volume of high-sugar drinks sold has not fallen over the past five years. So, whatever effect it may have had when it was first introduced, the levy is no longer encouraging people to cut down on high-sugar drinks.

Which of the following is an underlying assumption of the above argument?