Reading: Inference Across Two Passages on Doctoral Funding
A doctoral candidate must decide which of two short texts to cite in a funding justification. Text A states: "In 2023 the national science fund awarded 412 grants; 78% went to projects with an international co-author." Text B states: "Between 2019 and 2023, the number of applications to the same fund rose from 1,100 to 1,950, while the number of awards stayed near 400 each year." The candidate wants to argue that international collaboration improves a project's chance of being funded. She has 15 minutes to prepare a 120-word justification and must avoid any claim the texts do not support. She also knows the fund's review criteria include originality and feasibility, but neither text mentions them.
1. Can the candidate legitimately conclude from Texts A and B that having an international co-author raises the probability of winning a grant? Explain what each text does and does not establish.
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No. Text A shows only that 78% of the 412 awards in 2023 had an international co-author; it does not report how many applications had such a co-author, so no success rate can be computed. Text B shows applications nearly doubled while awards stayed near 400, meaning the overall success rate fell sharply, but it says nothing about co-authorship. Combining the two texts cannot produce a causal or probabilistic claim about international collaboration, because the comparison group (applications without an international co-author) is missing. The candidate may safely say that international co-authorship was common among funded projects in 2023 and that competition intensified between 2019 and 2023. Any stronger wording, such as "increases the chance," would be an unsupported inference.
2. The candidate writes: "Because competition tripled, only internationally connected teams can now succeed." Identify the two logical errors and rewrite the sentence so it is defensible using only the given data.
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First error: "competition tripled" misreads the data; applications rose from 1,100 to 1,950, which is roughly a 77% increase, not a tripling. Second error: "only internationally connected teams can now succeed" converts a majority share among winners (78%) into an exclusive condition, which the data cannot show because 22% of awards went to projects without an international co-author. A defensible rewrite: "Applications rose by about 77% between 2019 and 2023 while awards remained near 400 per year, and in 2023, 78% of awarded projects included an international co-author." This reports the trend and the share without asserting causation or exclusivity, and it keeps every figure traceable to Text A or Text B.