PT93.S3.Q24 - science-fiction films are commercially successful

plong222

Can anyone explain why S3 Q24 on PT 93 is B and not C? I know C has the conclusion less clearly delineated but other than that it seems to match up slightly better.

Steven_B-1

The stimulus says that a smaller number of doc films are commercially successful than sci-fi films. Let's make up numbers to make it easier to see.

Let's say 10 doc films are successful and 20 sci-fi films are successful.

However, we know that overall there are more doc films than sci-fi films. So let's say there are 50 doc films total and only 40 sci-fi films total.

The conclusion says that therefore there is a higher proportion or percentage of sci fi films that are successful. and yes that's a good argument because if we have 10/50 doc films that means that 20% are successful and if we have 20/40 sci-fi films being successful,that's 50%.

So in the original argument, we went from a statement about numbers to percentages. It's like me saying I have 10/100 collectable cards, that means i have 10% of them.

C is backwards. The first thing i noticed is that C is drawing a conclusion about absolute numbers from a premise about percentages. That's not what our original argument is doing and so i eliminated it immediately.

In terms of the substance of C, it's saying that even though we have more small modern apartments, say 100, versus idk 90 victorian apartments, a larger percentage of victorian apartments have bathtubs (let's say 50% versus 45%), therefore, MORE large victorian apartments have freestanding bathtubs.

If we follow through with out example with the random percentages i chose, we would get that we have 45 victorian apartments with bathtubs and also 45 modern apts. with bathtubs. So the argument is flawed because it doesn't always work. Depends on the percentages and numbers. But either way, this is not the same as the stimulus.

B is going from numbers to percentages just like our argument.
So 20 large victorian apts have bathtubs versus 10 modern apts with bathtubs.
Even though there are 50 small modern apts total and 40 victorian apts total.

Therefore, a larger percentage of victorian apts have bathtubs. YES, it works. because 20/40 victorian apts have bathtubs aka 50% and only 20% (10/50) of modern apts have bathtubs.

Perfect match! B is also harder to see because they kind of scramble the order of the ideas around to confuse you. C also starts with a similar phrase as the stimulus (smaller number of...) but that doesn't matter. If X is smaller than Y, you can also say that Y is greater than X, so that change in language is actually irrelevant because the meaning is the same.