Syllogism Shortcuts - Lesson 1

In almost all competitive exams, there will be a few questions on "Syllogism". In these type of questions they will give two or more statements followed by two or more conclusions. You have to choose which conclusion logically fits the given statements. The answer has to be chosen from the five given choices. Often these statements are funny and seem to be at variance of commonly known facts, but you should take them as they are True. 

It sounds very easier, but unfortunately most of the people tend to choose wrong answers by assuming them correct. In this post we shall discuss some shortcut techniques to perform well in syllogism section of competitive exams. Generally these questions can be answered by representing the given statements by Venn Diagrams. However, here we shall discuss another simple shortcut techniques to solve Syllogism problems in easy manner. 

Before going into details, lets look at some basic terms used in the rules and understand what they mean.

The two statements is given in the question are called "Premises" and the answer, the "Conclusion".

Eg :

All Dogs are Cats  ----------(1)

All Cats are Pigs  ------------(2)

The above two statements are called "Premises".

From above two statements, we can draw the Conclusion : All Dogs are Pigs.

The premises normally start with the words All, No, Some, Many , Some -- not, Many -- not. These words are referred to as qualifiers.

A premise consists of a subject and a predicate wherein the first term [eg. "Dogs" in statement (1)] is the subject and the second term [eg. "Cats" in statement (1)] the predicate. Similarly, in statement (2) "Cats" is called the subject and "Pigs" is called the predicate.

The word that occurs in both the premises is known as the "Middle Term". ("Cat" in the example above). The answer or "Conclusion" should consist of the other two words (dogs and pigs in the example above) and the middle term should not appear in the answer. 

The premises can be divided into

1. Universal Statements 
2. Particular Statements

This classification of the premises into the above categories is dependent on the qualifier used in the premise. For example, statements where "All" is used are called Universal statements and statements where "some" is used are called Particular Statements.

Premises can also be divided into

1. Positive (affirmative) statements and
2. Negative statements

If there is a negative term like "not" or "no" in the statement, it is called a negative premise. Otherwise it is called a positive premise or an affirmative statement.

The combination of the two different categories of classifications leads to four different premises as given in the below table.



Table I :

	Affirmative	Negative
Universal www.Gr8AmbitionZ.com	All A	No E
Particular www.Gr8AmbitionZ.com	Some;  many I	Some not;  many not O

 The subject or the predicate can either distributed or not distributed in the given premise.

The Subject and predicate are either distributed (✔) or not distributed (☓)depending on what kind of a statement it is (particular affirmative, etc.). Below table shows the distribution pattern of the subject and predicate. 

Table II :

	Subject	Predicate
Universal Affirmative www.Gr8AmbitionZ.com	✔	☓
Universal Negative  www.Gr8AmbitionZ.com	✔	✔
Particular Affirmative www.Gr8AmbitionZ.com	☓	☓
Particular Negative www.Gr8AmbitionZ.com	☓	✔

Note :

✔  Indicates Distributed.

☓  Indicates Undistributed.