The short answer
Arguments about people and society — and the correlation, confounding and competing-explanation traps they hinge on.
Written and checked by GAMSAT tutors — not AI-generated.
Try the reasoning style
We treat forgetting as a failure — a lapse to be patched with reminders and records. Yet a mind that kept everything could not think; it would drown in the undifferentiated noise of every moment it had ever lived. To forget is not so much to lose information as to decide, mostly without our noticing, what was never worth keeping.
The author's argument relies most directly on which unstated assumption?
Pick an option to see how the tutor reasons to the answer — not just whether you were right.
Not quite — the answer is B.
Work backwards from the conclusion: a mind that ‘kept everything’ supposedly ‘could not think.’ That only follows if thinking means leaving most of experience out — so B is the premise the argument quietly rests on. A raises reliability, which the passage never weighs; C contradicts ‘mostly without our noticing’; D smuggles in a claim about intellect the passage never makes. The question rewards finding the hidden premise, not recalling a fact.
Social-science passages argue about people and society — economics, psychology, sociology, history. They lean heavily on data and studies, which makes them a playground for the correlation-versus-causation trap and competing interpretations of the same facts.
Every correlation has at least three stories
If A and B rise together, it could be: A causes B, B causes A (reverse causation), or a third factor C causes both (a confounder). A strong reader holds all three in mind before accepting the author's preferred one.
Description isn't explanation
A passage may describe a trend convincingly yet explain it poorly. Separate the data (what happened) from the interpretation (why). The data can be solid while the causal story laid over it is just one possibility among several.
Worked example
"Countries with more fast-food outlets have higher obesity rates, so fast food is driving the obesity crisis." Identify the reasoning move and a competing explanation.
Check yourself
A study finds that students who eat breakfast score higher on tests. Before concluding breakfast causes better scores, the most important thing to consider is:
Key takeaways
- Social science = arguments about people/society, heavy on data.
- A correlation has three stories: A→B, B→A, or a confounder C→both.
- Separate the data (what happened) from the interpretation (why).
- Look for confounders and competing explanations before accepting a cause.
- Solid data can still carry a shaky causal story.
Practise this with real GAMSAT-style questions
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