Thank you for the advice!

Something that helped me understand why B (which I chose during the drill and during BR) is the wrong answer choice is by looking at it this way :

1) the total number of acres of timberland fell -- Who's to say that it didn't fall by only 1 acre or by even 0.5 acres? Plus, nothing in the stimulus or in answer choice B indicates that the decrease in timberland would negatively impact employment.

2) the demand for wood products in the country increased -- Neither the stimulus nor answer choice B indicates that any demand for wood products would be a demand for Ravonian wood products. Maybe the entire country was really jazzed about wood products from England or something. The point is: this part of the answer choice does not directly fill in the cracks that make up the discrepancy in the stimulus (and neither does the first part of this answer choice).

Here's how I see answer choice C : a growing proportion of Ravonian unprocessed wood being exported (sold out-of-country) accounts for the discrepancy in the stimulus because (as JY said)

1) the stimulus details that the job loss had to do with wood processing (so there's fewer people to process wood which probably means that there is more unprocessed, raw wood).

2) the stimulus also detailed that there was an increase in wood taken from the country's forest and a "growing proportion" of that wood being exported could definitely account for that increase.

It's important to note that answer choice C does make a lot of assumptions (like maybe the wood processing job loss was due to a new wood processing machine, and maybe the "growing proportion" was that it went from 1 unprocessed tree for every 50 processed trees in 1977 to 2 unprocessed trees for every 50 processed trees by 1987 and therefore maybe they were only chopping down 1 extra tree by 1987) but correct RRE answer choices don't need to be assumption-free -- they just need to provide one sort-of-solid possible explanation for the discrepancy, which in and of itself is a lot like an assumption.

No, because "only if" is a group 2 indicator meaning that it introduces the necessary condition and since "only if" comes before "investment decreases", "investment decreases" is the necessary condition.

Thank you so much!

How can you tell what pieces of other people's arguments/data is context and what isn't? I understand that "but" and other similar transition words indicate a turn to argument, but "recent statistics"could also indicate additional context. How do you tell context apart from premises that are taken from other people's work (that are being used to support the author's argument)?

#help