Explanation for Question 38 From the Reading Section on the 2019 October Sat
Question 38 says the author's main purpose inciting the study in the last sentence 2 of the passage is to do what? So let's look back at this citation 3 for some context here. And so that citation is starting in line 70. 4 It says as one study noted, people took such judgements as indications. 5 The forecasters were either generally incompetent ignorant of the facts in a given case 6 or lazy unwilling to expend the effort required to gather information that would 7 justify greater confidence. So if we kind of consider 8 this in the context of the argument of the passage, 9 we can see that the argument is kind of explicitly stated there in line 10 62. It says confidence and accuracy, accuracy are positively correlated, 11 but research shows we exaggerate the size of the correlation. 12 So this quotation here of the study at the end is going to be 13 kind of like evidence supporting that idea, 14 right? 15 These are the conclusions that people are making based off of the fact that 16 a forecaster is saying something has the middling probability. 17 And so they're equating that middling probability with laziness 18 or incompetence. Whereas you can see that they would probably equate more 19 like a more competent probability. So like a hundred percent probability versus 0% 20 probability with competence or a hardworking 21 nature. So in this case, 22 this citation of the study is just a supporting 23 idea of the argument that they're advancing, 24 which you can see here. So let's...