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How do we respond to a statement? I know we don’t usually answer to a statement but a question, however, I found this in a job application form.

The statement was:

You have not been convicted of any crimes.

  • Was this statement part of a list of 'true or false' statements? –  Dec 28 '22 at 08:50
  • I am sorry, I have forgotten. I was not convicted of any crime and my answer was “No”. But I was laughed at. The interviewer said if I were not convicted, the answer should be “yes”. –  Dec 28 '22 at 08:57
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    The interviewer is correct, you are expected to confirm that the statement is true. However, unless the application form made clear that you were supposed to confirm the truth of the statement it was a poorly written form. Even if it did make that clear it is an odd way to ask the question. – BoldBen Dec 28 '22 at 09:36
  • I would expect that there's a checkbox next to this. You check the box to indicate that the statement is true. It's probably one of several statements that you have to confirm. If the statements are followed by blank lines, you would be expected to write Yes or No in them. – Barmar Dec 30 '22 at 01:06
  • I'd also expect that there's an introduction before the list that tells you what to do. It should say something like "Please confirm the following statements:" – Barmar Dec 30 '22 at 01:08
  • Does this answer your question? [How to answer a negative question?](https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/233915/) Also [Answering question with yes or no](https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/149991/) and [answering "Yes" or "No" for a question "She doesn't hate me, right?"](https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/157039/) and [yes/no answers to negative questions](https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/320701/yes-no-answers-to-negative-questions), among others. – FumbleFingers Jan 14 '23 at 17:55
  • It looks like a specification rather than something that needs confirmation. Details please! – James K Jan 14 '23 at 22:30

1 Answers1

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Logically, we will confirm this statement, because we can do nothing except to confirm or reject the statement that is aforementioned before. This may be a response-seeking question which requires us to give response rather than answer. You can shape the response so it correspond to what you have done. But if you have been convicted with a crime, you need to say 'no' response because double negatives creates a positive answer.