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Section 1 · Logical Reasoning.

Chaque question porte sur un court argument. Choisissez la réponse qui répond le mieux à la question posée, en vous fondant uniquement sur le raisonnement présenté.

A recent study found that people who take a daily nap have a lower risk of heart disease than people who do not. The researchers concluded that napping reduces the risk of heart disease.

The city should build its new library on Elm Street rather than on Oak Street. The Elm Street site is closer to the train station, so more residents will be able to reach the library without a car.

Every employee who was promoted this year had completed the company's leadership training course. Clearly, then, completing the course is what causes employees to be promoted.

Historians have long held that the ancient city was abandoned because of a prolonged drought. However, pollen samples from the site show that crops continued to be grown there for at least a century after the supposed drought began.

All of the paintings in the Halvorsen collection are more than two hundred years old. None of the paintings that the museum acquired last year is more than a century old.

After a tax on sugary drinks was introduced, sales of sugary drinks within the city fell by a third. Yet surveys showed that city residents were consuming just as much sugary drink as before.

Principle: A person should be praised for an action only if the action was both beneficial and performed with the intention of benefiting others. Application: Renfrew should not be praised for his donation to the shelter.

If the bakery uses fresh yeast, the bread will rise properly. The bread rose properly today. So the bakery must have used fresh yeast.

Section 2 · Reading Comprehension.

Lisez le texte et répondez aux quatre questions qui suivent. Fondez vos réponses uniquement sur ce que le texte affirme ou implique.

The doctrine of stare decisis, the principle that courts should follow their own past decisions, is often defended on the ground that it makes the law predictable. If litigants can rely on courts to decide like cases alike, they can order their affairs with confidence, and the law acquires a stability that arbitrary, case-by-case adjudication could never provide. On this view, the chief virtue of precedent is that it constrains judges, replacing their personal preferences with the accumulated judgement of the past.

Critics of the doctrine have questioned whether it delivers the predictability it promises. A precedent, they point out, is not a rule that decides future cases mechanically; it is a decision on particular facts, and its bearing on a later case is always a matter of interpretation. A judge who wishes to depart from an inconvenient precedent need not overrule it openly. She may instead distinguish it, identifying some feature of the earlier case that is absent in the present one and declaring the precedent inapplicable. Because almost any two cases differ in some respect, the room for distinguishing is considerable, and a determined judge can often reach the result she favours while professing to respect the past.

Defenders of stare decisis do not deny that precedents can be distinguished, but they argue that the critics draw the wrong conclusion from this fact. The possibility of distinguishing, they contend, is not a defect but a necessary source of flexibility. A legal system that treated every precedent as an inflexible rule would soon find itself bound by decisions that changing circumstances had rendered unjust or absurd, and would have to choose between applying bad law and abandoning precedent altogether. Distinguishing allows the law to develop incrementally, adapting old principles to new situations without the disruption that wholesale overruling would cause.

What both sides share, notably, is the assumption that predictability and adaptability are the relevant measures of the doctrine's worth. A third position, less often heard, holds that the deepest justification of stare decisis is neither: it is the principle that persons who come before the courts are entitled to be treated as their predecessors were, whether or not this makes the law either more predictable or more adaptable.