Each question has a set of four sequentially ordered statements. Each…
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Each question has a set of four sequentially ordered statements. Each statement can be classified as one of the following:
• Facts (F), which deal with the pieces of information that one has heard, seen or read, and which are open to discovery or verification.
• Inferences (I), which are conclusions drawn about unknown, on the basis of the known.
• Judgments (J), which are opinions that imply approval or disapproval of persons, objects, situations and occurrences in the past, the present or the future.
Select the answer option that best describes the set of four statements:
(A) This does not mean that United States of America should become more bourgeois.
(B) No one can imagine that peace will come to the Middle East countries without the help of US.
(C) Yet a political leader who understands that United States of America is not the uncontested hyper power of the 1990s. A leader who values soft power more than the hard version will bring a change for the better.
(D) An America led by such a man will listen more carefully to and work more closely with allies and rivals, will strive harder to respect the laws it has signed up to and might enter into new commitments, for instance to tackle climate change.
- A.
IIII
- B.
JJJJ
- C.
IIJJ
- D.
JJII
Attempted by 176 students.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: B
Concept: An Inference is a conclusion that follows strictly and logically from a fact already established somewhere in the passage. A Judgment, by contrast, is any statement that expresses approval or disapproval - a normative claim about what should happen, an explicitly evaluative claim (for the better/for the worse), or a confident forecast/characterization that the writer simply asserts as their own conviction without deriving it from any fact stated in the passage.
Application - checking each statement against this test:
Statement (A) - “This does not mean that United States of America should become more bourgeois.” uses ‘should’, a direct normative opinion about desired conduct, not a conclusion drawn from any established fact - a judgment.
Statement (B) - “No one can imagine that peace will come to the Middle East countries without the help of US.” is presented as an unquestioned conviction about what people believe, not as a conclusion deduced from any fact the passage actually states; it asserts the necessity of the US role as the writer’s own opinion - a judgment.
Statement (C) - “A leader who values soft power more than the hard version will bring a change for the better.” explicitly says ‘for the better’, direct evaluative approval - a judgment.
Statement (D) - “An America led by such a man will listen more carefully … and might enter into new commitments, for instance to tackle climate change.” is the writer’s own favourable expectation of a leader they already approve of - listening ‘more carefully’, working ‘more closely’, striving ‘harder’ - none of which is deduced from any fact stated in the passage; it is a hopeful, approving characterization - a judgment.
Cross-check: the passage does not state a single verifiable fact anywhere to reason from, and none of the four statements is a strict logical deduction from an established fact - each one carries the writer's own evaluative stance (a should, an explicit for the better, or a confident unproven conviction). With no fact available to infer from, none of the four can be an inference.
Result: all four statements are judgments, so the pattern is Judgment, Judgment, Judgment, Judgment - matching the option JJJJ.