C Logical Fallacies Quiz

L Form: Red Herring

A
Directions: Match each example with the correct logical fallacy from the box below. Read carefully!
S
S 1. Even though it’s only the first day, I can tell this is going to be a boring class. a. red herring
2. The public should not support Dr. Mason’s plan for improving county health b. straw man
services. He is a former alcoholic whose wife recently divorced him. c. slanting
C 3. Employees are like nails. Just as nails must be hit in the head in order to d. slippery slope
make them work, so must employees. e. either/or
O 4. Cigarettes should be banned. Children who start smoking cigarettes will ab. false analogy
P then move on to marijuana, which is a gateway drug to all the others. Once a bc. ad populum
kid starts smoking marijuana, he’ll get curious and then try cocaine, then
Y LSD, and then heroin. Cigarettes are the gateway to death.
cd. ad hominem
5. My roommate said her philosophy class was difficult, and the one I’m in is de. post hoc ergo
difficult, too. All philosophy classes must be hard. propter hoc
6. Andrea Dworkin has written several books arguing that pornography harms ad. hasty
women. But Dworkin is an ugly, bitter person, so you shouldn’t listen to her. generalization
D 7. I drank tap water and now I am sick, so the water must have made me sick.
8. You are either a conservative or a liberal.
O 9. Green Peace’s strategies aren’t effective because they were all thought up by dirty, lazy hippies. C
10. What?! You want schools to teach sex education that goes beyond the abstinence only approach? I L
really don’t think that it’s appropriate to tell children in kindergarten how to use a condom!
N 11. I disagree with the councilman’s statement on the need for more parks in our city. After all, how can we A
O trust him? He got into trouble recently for not making his child-support payments. S
12. Because our daughter benefitted from home schooling, every child should be educated in this way.
T 13. During the last ten years, every time a Republican is elected president, a recession has followed. The S
recessions were caused by the Republican presidents.
14. At one time, American history books used the word “massacre” when describing Native Americans
M attacking white settlers, but now they use word almost invariably when describing whites attacking C
A Native Americans, and never when Native Americans commit atrocities against the settlers. O
R 15. After a named storm entered the Gulf of Mexico, Craig Biggio’s batting average would always rise
significantly. These tropical storms and hurricanes caused Biggio to play better baseball. P
K 16. When America criticized the Israeli bombing of Beirut in 1981 in which 300 civilians were killed, Y
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin said, “I don’t want to hear anything from the Americans about
hitting civilian targets. I know exactly what America did in Vietnam.”
17. The overcrowded conditions in some parts of our city have forced people together like rats in a cage.
Like rats, they will eventually turn on one another, fighting and killing until a balance is restored.
18. A city councilman recently claimed that women will never be competent firefighters. To support his
argument, he pointed out that none of the women in the city’s training program had passed the exam. D
[He did not mention that there were only two women in the program. By withholding this fact, what O
logical fallacy was he guilty of?]
19. With a decrease in the number of pirates, there has been an increase in global warming over the same
period. Therefore, global warming is caused by a lack of pirates. N
20. I cheated on my organic chemistry test, and no one caught me. I’m too smart for any professor to catch.
21. Gay marriages are just immoral. Seventy percent of Americans think so! O
22. You keep saying that you want to relax gun control laws, but why is it so important that everyone have T
automatic weapons, even small children and the mentally disabled?
23. How long will America tolerate these opponents of gun control who want only criminals to have guns?
24. We have to support our Second Amendment rights to bear arms. As soon as guns are made illegal, M
suddenly you’ll find the government taking more and more of our rights away until we are all slaves to
the state. If we lose our Second Amendment rights, the others will follow, one by one.
A
25. The mayor pointed out that crime statistics for the city had declined during the last three years of his R
administration. [Not mentioned is the fact that the crime statistics were formerly based on arrests, and K
are now based on convictions.]
Answers:

1. AD
2. CD
3. AB
4. D
5. AD
6. CD
7. DE
8. E
9. CD
10. B
11. CD
12. AD
13. DE
14. C
15. DE
16. A
17. AB
18. C
19. DE
20. AD
21. BC
22. B
23. B
24. D
25. C