Deductive Reasoning

Welcome back to Wednesday Wisdom - your weekly dose of GAMSAT study tips and advice.

Today I'm going to introduce you to deductive reasoning probably the most important and prevalent reasoning skill in the GAMSAT.

Connecting the dots

I describe deductive reasoning as how we draw conclusions by connecting facts. To demonstrate this, let's dive into a puzzle...

The puzzle

Four friends, Alex, Brooke, Casey, and Drew, each live in a different coloured house (red, blue, green, yellow) and own a different pet (dog, cat, bird, fish).

1.Alex does not live in the red house and does not own the bird.

2.Brooke lives immediately to the left of the yellow house.

3.Casey owns the dog.

4.Drew lives in the red house.

5.The green house’s owner owns the fish.

6.The person in the yellow house owns the cat.

Who lives in which house with which pet?

What on earth do I do?

As we look at this, there is so much going on and when we go through all the clues, we don't have all the information we need. 

Deductive reasoning is where we use one fact to work out subsequent facts, because that is the only logical conclusion.

I don't like being too prescriptive with how to do reasoning as it is always so fluid between different problems, but we want to draw connections between facts and other information to draw new conclusions.

How is this relevant to GAMSAT?

Have a look through the practice material and you will see that there are actually a lot of questions with a set of rules or facts.

And really these problems are about using deductive reasoning to work through this information to draw new conclusions. 

A great example of this is Q26-28 in the practice questions (orange) booklet. 

Give these a go and let me know how you go!

Jim