CAT Critical Reasoning Practice question with Solution 72

You may have been struck by the unusual phrase “violent interpersonal crimes”; this indeed turns out to be the argument’s weak point. (A) says that the French government’s definition of what constituted a “violent interpersonal crime” expanded throughout the 1300’s to include crimes that were actually NON-violent. If that’s the case, then the evidence that more people were arrested for so-called “violent interpersonal crimes” no longer warrants the conclusion that there was actually a higher level of real violence documented. (A) is therefore our weakener.

(B) is irrelevant. The fact that there are descriptions of violent attacks in the 1300’s has no bearing on an argument discussing the number of such attacks as compared with the previous century.

(C) doesn’t hurt the conclusion at all. We don’t know how many people actually took the oaths (it might be a very small number like thirty, up from a previous count of twenty), how many kept them, or whether the non-oath takers were bashing each other with more and more gusto.

(D) First of all, the acts of violence answer choice (D) refers to may very well have been committed in war, which doesn’t count. More importantly, though, choice (D) refers to violence increasing, whereas a weakener must suggest that documented interpersonal violence didn’t increase.

(E) As an account of France’s population in the 1300’s, (E) is ambiguous (first it increased then it decreased), so we don’t know how France’s population in that century compared to France’s population in the 1200’s. Even so, it’s also unclear how the supposed population changes are connected to interpersonal violence. In essence, (E) tells us nothing