How to Approach Most Strongly Supported Questions
Lesson 1 of 23, 7m
DON’T BE FOOLED BY THE QUESTION STEM.
Of the five answer choices each Most Strongly Supported (MSS) question
gives you, only one will have any support at all. The other four will be utterly
unsupported. That means there is only one correct answer choice and four
very wrong answer choices. This question type, despite what its name may
suggest, is not actually asking you to decide between some marginal
differential in the intensity of support between two answer choices. Which
answer choice is better supported is the wrong question to ask. Rather, the
right question to ask is which answer choice has some support and which four
have no support what so ever.
MSS questions are very similar to Main Point (MP) questions. This shouldn’t
be surprising as you’ll notice the word “support” in the title of this question
type and in the definition of conclusions. Recall that definition. What do we
call a statement that receives the most support? We call it the conclusion. As
such, the MSS question type is asking you to search out the conclusion.
Sounds familiar right? There is a difference between the two question types
of course. It is minor and it is this: For MP questions, the conclusion is in the
stimulus. You simply have to identify it, which of course, assumes that you
can tease out the support structure between the statements in the stimulus. For
MSS questions, the conclusion is removed from the stimulus and tucked
away in the answer choices. If you understand the notion of “support” you’ll
still be able to locate the displaced conclusion, here, known as the right
answer choice.
Another point of difference between MSS and MP questions lies in how
much of the stimulus is used to support the right answer choice. For MP
questions, often there is the feeling that the entire stimulus is moving towards
supporting one main conclusion. That does happen for MSS questions as
well, as we stated in the previous paragraph. However, many of these
questions zero in on only one or two statements from the stimulus and push
just those together to force out the right answer choice, i.e., the most strongly
supported answer choice. An example of this is where the correct answer
choice simply restates a particular statement in the stimulus in a more general
way, e.g., the stimulus tells you that there is a black cat in the house and the
right answer choice says that there are mammals that live in the community.
It’s absolutely right. Take those two statements together and you’ve got
yourself a very well-supported argument.
In my mind, I lump Most Strongly Supported questions into the Inference
question types. They are technically not the same. But, that’s a discussion to
be had later, when we encounter Inference question types.
Examples of Most Strongly Supported question stems include:

The consultant’s statements, if true, most strongly support which one of
the following?

Which one of the following conclusions is most strongly supported by the
information above?

Which one of the following is most strongly supported by the information
above?

Which one of the following is most reasonably supported by the
information above?

Which one of the following is most strongly supported by the statements
above, if they are true?
LET’S REVIEW
MSS questions contain only one answer choice with support. The other four
are utterly without support. MSS questions are very similar to MP questions
in that you’re being asked to identify a conclusion, i.e., a statement which
receives support. However, unlike MP questions, sometimes only a small
portion of the stimulus is used to support the right answer choice.