00:01
And so we arrive at the treatment of ideas.
Note the difference that the official content guide uses in this language.
00:10
They don't state the presentation of ideas but the treatment of ideas
for this specific subset of questions within reasoning within the text questions.
00:21
To evaluate these, we might think that the skills
we've been discussing can be long and daunting.
00:29
But truthfully, evaluating a CARS passage is in many ways
similar to evaluating spoken arguments, something we do almost every day.
00:41
Consider the following three cases
where you might need to evaluate a verbal claim.
00:46
Firstly, someone tries to sell you a pencil by telling you
that this the best pencil you could possibly purchase.
00:54
How about someone tries to persuade you that chlorine
in the water supply is damaging to your gut bacteria.
01:03
Lastly, something we're all familiar with,
someone tries to convince you to vote for a political candidate.
01:12
In each of these situations, you would want to ask yourself
what the intentions were of the speaker trying to convince you.
01:19
Having evaluated that the speaker had good intentions,
you would want to further evaluate
if they were reliable in other aspects of their background.
01:29
You would want to see if the speaker
was evading addressing a particular counterargument
over stating their authority on a particular issue
or if they were making claims without adequate evidence.
01:43
These same tools will help you to see in a CARS passage
if an author has written in an authoritative and objective fashion.
01:54
CARS authors are particularly talented
when it comes to couching subjective ideas as objective facts.
02:02
It's okay for an author to hold an opinion
but if you skim a text superficially,
you might fall into the trap of believing
that opinions in a CARS passage do not exist.
02:14
You also don't want to evaluate the treatment
of every single idea if a question doesn't ask you to do so.
02:22
That's why our CARS passage strategy will include reevaluation
of passage arguments after you've read a passage.
02:32
Thus, you need to look beyond which ideas
are presented into how those ideas are treated.
02:40
Since an author has let an idea into their CARS passage,
that idea is assumed to be important and relevant.
02:48
But think of ideas as people.
02:50
Just because you let a person, idea into your house, CARS passage,
doesn't mean that you treat all people, ideas, in the same way.
03:01
Subtle and at times, unintentional attitudes that an author presents
towards different ideas can clue you into the biases of the author.