Thread: Personal Foul??
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Old Thu Dec 04, 2008, 04:21am
eg-italy eg-italy is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Italy
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Quote:
Originally Posted by refnrev View Post
Testing for promotion this weekend. Study guides I am using have these questions with conflicting answers:

" A personal foul cannot occur during a dead ball." It says T
" A personal foul can only occur during a live ball." It says F

I say the first one is wrong and should be False because of the airborne shooter exception when the ball is dead. (4-19-1)

Everyone agree or disagree with me?
For professional reasons I should be an expert in things like these.

Let's try and translate those sentences into logically equivalent ones:

(1) If the ball is dead then a foul is not personal
(2) If a foul is personal then the ball is alive

Let's write A for "a foul is personal" and B for "the ball is alive". Then
(1) becomes "If (not B) then (not A)", while (2) becomes "if A then B".

Now it's well known that "If P then Q" is logically equivalent to
"(not P) or Q". Then (1) is logically equivalent to "(not not B) or (not A)"
while (2) is equivalent to "(not A) or B". It's now sufficient to remember
that "(not not B)" is equivalent to "B".

I've shown that the two sentences say exactly the same thing and
it cannot happen that one is false and the other is true.

Another proof that math is useful.

Ciao
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