Logical Reasoning
Cause and Effect
3,795 words, 9 sections
Cause and Effect is the sixth unit of Logical Reasoning in the PMDC MDCAT-2025 uniform curriculum, and its three outcomes ask the student to give reasons for incidents, events and accidents, reject false beliefs through valid arguments, and build positive thinking in the society. Logical Reasoning is worth 9 of the 180 marks, and this chapter accounts for 26 distinct questions across 20 official papers between 2000 and 2026, examined by six boards at a mean item difficulty of 2.31, with 380 active questions in the practice bank. Causal Relationships and Reasoning holds 23 of the 26 questions over the whole span and all six boards, Strengthening and Weakening Arguments holds 2, and Data Interpretation and Statistical Reasoning holds 1, set in 2025. No textbook exists for this subject, so the note is built from the questions that were set. A student who has this material can read two short statements, decide whether one brought the other about or whether something else drove both, and see through the argument that treats a single factor as the whole explanation.
The dominant form gives two numbered statements and four fixed verdicts: statement I is the cause and statement II its effect, statement II is the cause and statement I its effect, both statements are independent causes, and both statements are the effects of independent causes. A fifth verdict, that both are effects of some common cause, turns up among the options but is rarely the key. The task is to decide which reading the pair actually supports.
The first move is to ask whether the two statements are about the same situation at all. If they are not, no causal connection exists and the answer is one of the independent verdicts; the choice between "independent causes" and "effects of independent causes" then follows from how each statement is phrased, since an outcome being measured is an effect while a decision taken is a cause. Only when the two statements plainly belong to one chain does a cause-and-effect verdict become available.
The verdicts are not rankings of likelihood. The examiner is not asking which story is most probable overall but which relation the two written statements themselves express, so an unstated third event that would explain both is outside the question.
7 more sections in this chapter
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