Hello,
I am currently struggling with distinguising assumptions vs facts in the critical reasoning and argument section. I was wondering if there is a list of verbs that tells us what is an assumption vs fact that I can “memorize” so that it’s easier for me to identify the assumption.
In the context of CR questions, you can think of assumptions as the bridge between a fact and a conclusion. Assumptions on the GRE will rarely be stated outright; you are expected to be able to “read between the lines” and see what logical leaps are being made.
For example:
My car is yellow which makes it easier to find in a busy lot.
Fact: The car is yellow (any information explicitly stated by the author is treated as a fact for the purposes of the argument).
Conclusion: the car is easy to find (treat conclusions as unproven, and think about what else needs to be true for the conclusion to be valid)
One unstated assumption that bridges these statements is that yellow is a rare color in the lot. That idea is never stated in the sentence, so we don’t know whether it’s true. If I’m in a storage lot full of yellow taxis, the conclusion fails.
So let’s say we instead get this statement on the test:
My car is yellow, and since very few cars are yellow in this lot, it’s easier to find when I’m parked here.
Now we have two given statements to treat as fact:
That takes care of one assumption, but there are still others we can find: what if the person searching is colorblind? What if all the cars are covered in a layer of snow? What if most people only use license plate numbers to find their cars? Or even more simply–what if no one forgets where they parked?
No matter how unlikely, any of these hypotheticals are valid as long as they could be true. That’s why CR questions ask which statement, if true, would strengthen or weaken the conclusion.