Section One: Identify the fallacies of relevance which appear in the following passages and explain how the fallacy you have chosen is committed.

1. Steve Forbes has been campaigning for years now for a flat income tax rate and arguing the benefits of such a tax system for the American people. Of course Mr. Forbes would like to see a flat tax rate since under the current system he is in the highest tax bracket.

2. Either you sign the peace treaty now or the United States will invade your country.

3. The people in Kosovo are being hunted down like animals, children are being deprived of their parents, and ancient villages destroyed leaving millions of ordinary people without food and shelter. Therefore it is necessary to bomb Serbia back to the stone age.

4. All Americans who love their country support their troops, and when that flag goes up their heart swells with pride and sorrow thinking of the men who gave their lives for our freedom. So whenever American troops are in combat we must support the war effort.

5. The president of Serbia asserts that allowing NATO peace keeping troops onto a province of his country would be equivalent to an invasion. However, the president of Serbia is a genocidal fiend so we should not listen to anything he has to say.

6. Michael Jordan believes that the invasion of Serbia is a necessary humanitarian action, and if he thinks so then so should we.

7. We know that there are some dangers in having our planes conduct air operations over Serbian air space and that lives might be lost. However, no one knows how many lives will be lost if we do not act now. So acting now is the only viable option.

8. The Serbians are Christians and the Albanians are Moslems, so we should support any action taken by the Serbians.

9.If you won’t go out with me tonight, I will bring a sexual harassment suit against you and get you fired.

Section Two: Identify the fallacies of presumption in the following passages and explain how the fallacy is being committed.

10. We have to bomb Serbia, since if we do not bomb Serbia no one will.

11. That a student is only allowed four absences is clearly stated in the syllabus, thus the fact that you have been in the hospital for the last two weeks does not matter, you are still dropped from the class.

12. If I wear the same shirt I wore in Duke’s four other games, then Duke will win the national championship, since they won the other games when I wore this shirt.

13. When did you commit your first crime against humanity?

14. I can eat all the fatty foods I want and my cholesterol never rises, so all those studies that link diet to cholesterol levels must be wrong.

15. Caesar should not have gone to the Senate on the day of his death, because bad things always happen on the Ides of March.

Section Three: Identify the fallacies of ambiguity in the following passages, and explain how the fallacy has been committed.

16. The dog tracks lead in to the house.

17. It is the duty of our government to protect the lives of Americans.

18. Marriage is a fine institution, but who wants to live in an institution?

19. The gross national product of China has now reached the sixth highest in the world, therefore the income of the individual Chinese citizen must be the sixth highest in the world.

20. The World trade towers are the tallest buildings in the world, so the windows of the building must be the tallest windows in the world.

21. Each cell of which the human body is constructed lacks the ability to reason, therefore human beings must lack the ability to reason.

Section Four: Using the traditional square of opposition and the immediate inferences assess whether the following statements are true, false, or undetermined, based upon the given true proposition and explain how you arrived at this answer. Use the back of the test to explain your answers.

17. All Presidents are lechers =T

a. Some presidents are not lechers

b. Some presidents are non lechers

c. No lechers are presidents

d. All lechers are nonpresidents

e. Some lechers are presidents

18. No Yankees are good people =T

a. Some good people are yankees

b. All nongood people are nonyankees

c. Some nongood people are yankees

d. Some nongood people are not non yankees

e. All yankees are nongood people

19. Some food products are poisonous things=T

a. Some non poisonous things are not non food products

b. All poisonous things are food products

c. All poisonous things are non food products

d. Some food products are not nonpoisonous things

e. No poisonous things are food products.

20. Some knights in shining armor are not attractive people=T

a. All nonattractive people are nonknights in shining armor.

b. Some nonattractive people are knights in shining armor

c. All knights in shining armor are nonattractive people

d. Some attractive people are knights in shining armor.

e. All attractive people are nonknights in shining armor.