21
practice examMultiple Choice

Practice Exam

Question 21 • TPS EdX English Language Arts 11

Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics . There is a tale, “The Ring of Gyges,” that Feldman sometimes tells his economist friends. It comes from Plato’s Republic . A student named Glaucon offered the story in response to a lesson by Socrates—who, like Adam Smith, argued that people are generally good even without enforcement. Glaucon, like Feldman’s economist friends, disagreed. He told of a shepherd named Gyges who stumbled upon a secret cavern with a corpse inside that wore a ring. When Gyges put on the ring, he found that it made him invisible. With no one able to monitor his behavior, Gyges proceeded to do woeful things—seduce the queen, murder the king, and so on. Glaucon’s story posed a moral question: could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed? Glaucon seemed to think the answer was no. But Paul Feldman sides with Socrates and Adam Smith—for he knows the answer, at least 87 percent of the time, is yes. Feldman reaches the conclusion that most people are honest without receiving an incentive by

Answer
A
making a broad generalization about morality and looking for evidence.
B
studying a counterclaim about morality and arriving at a broad generalization.
C
studying his individual experiences and arriving at a broad generalization.
D
making a claim about his individual experiences and looking for evidence.

Explanation

Feldman reaches a general conclusion about people’s honesty from his own repeated experience selling bagels and tracking how often customers paid. This moves from particular observations to a broader claim about human behavior, which is inductive reasoning. So the best choice is “studying his individual experiences and arriving at a broad generalization.”

AI-written and checked against the verified answer.

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