This is a Flaw/Descriptive Weakening question.
The stimulus says that a club wanted to determine whether it could increase attendance by changing its weekly meeting from Tuesday to another day. So at one Tuesday meeting, the club's president took a survey of all members present, and 95% said they had no difficulty attending on Tuesdays. The club president therefore concluded that the attendance problem was not due to scheduling conflicts.
This is strange. Why did the president survey the members already present at a Tuesday meeting on whether Tuesday is a good day? They already showed up to the meeting, so Tuesday is obviously a convenient day for them. And while you can say that the Tuesday meeting was not an issue for the Tuesday attendees, you cannot draw the same conclusion about all members. This is the big flaw in the argument. The members present on Tuesday are an unrepresentative sample, and they specifically do not represent the people who were not present on Tuesday.
Here is a helpful analogy. Say I am an ice cream shop owner who only sells vanilla ice cream and I want to increase my revenue by possibly changing my flavor to chocolate or strawberry. So I survey all of my customers and 95% say they have no problem with the vanilla flavor. I therefore decide that my revenue problem is not due to the flavoring of the ice cream. What a silly argument, right? I am asking people who are already buying my vanilla ice cream if vanilla flavor is the issue. The customers surveyed are not representative of people who are not yet my customers.
Answer Choice (B) says that the reasoning makes a generalization on the basis of a sample that is likely to be unrepresentative. (B) picks up on the cookie-cutter flaw above. The club president makes a generalization about all members on the basis of an unrepresentative sample, the members who had no problem showing up on Tuesdays.
Answer Choice (A) says that the reasoning draws a conclusion on the basis of circular reasoning. This is not an instance of circular reasoning. Circular reasoning has conclusions and premises that effectively say the same thing, such as “I am the best because no one in the world is better than me.”
If you picked (A), you might have thought that the argument uses circular reasoning because of the repeated use of Tuesday meeting attendance. However, circular reasoning would look something like “the attendance problem is not due to scheduling conflicts because scheduling conflicts do not create attendance problems.” The stimulus instead has distinct premise and conclusion claims.
Answer Choice (C) says that the reasoning treats a generalization that applies to most cases as if it applied without exception. But the conclusion explicitly accounts for possible exclusions because it says the attendance problem was not due primarily to scheduling conflicts. For (C) to be correct, the argument would have to say that since most members of our club said that weekend meetings are okay, weekend meetings are okay for everybody in our club.
Answer Choice (D) says the reasoning draws a conclusion on the basis of premises that contradict one another. The stimulus does draw a conclusion, but there are no premises that contradict one another.
To contradict the first premise, we have to say that a club does not want to figure out if it could increase attendance by changing its weekly meeting. To contradict the next premise, we have to say that at one Tuesday meeting, the club president did not take a survey. To contradict the last premise, we have to say that of those surveyed, 95% said that they did have difficulty with a Tuesday meeting. None of these contradictory statements are present in the stimulus.
Answer Choice (E) is the oldest mistake in the book. It says that the club president’s reasoning is inferring, solely from the claim that a change is not sufficient to solve a problem, that it is not necessary either.
Let's illustrate what the argument would have to look like for (E) to be correct. A club has decided that it wants to double its attendance. It realized that if they move their meetings from Tuesdays to Fridays, their attendance will increase by only 10%. Since this change is not sufficient, it concluded that it is not necessary either.
That’s sufficiency necessity confusion. It’s a flaw because it’s possible that moving the meeting to Friday, while insufficient, is actually necessary. For example, perhaps providing free beer on Fridays will supply the remaining 90% increase. While neither change is independently sufficient, both are necessary.
The author also assumes that not completing audits within a year demonstrates a lack of action from the agency to follow through with their initiative.
A
The plan to crack down on violations of corporate income tax law is part of a broad campaign against corporate misconduct.
B
The number of personal income tax returns audited over the past year is greater than in previous years.
C
Most audits of corporate income tax returns do not reveal any significant violations.
D
It generally takes longer than one year to complete an audit of a corporate income tax return.
E
Over the last five years, fewer audits of corporate income tax returns have been completed than in the preceding five years.
This is a Flaw/Descriptive Weakening question.
The stimulus says that making some types of products from recycled materials is probably as damaging to the environment as it would be to make those products from entirely nonrecycled material. This is the conclusion. If we use soda cans as an example, making soda cans from recycled aluminum is just as damaging to the environment as making them from new aluminum.
Why is this so? The premise is that the recycling process for those products requires as much energy as producing them from raw materials, and almost all energy production damages the environment. Okay, so producing a recycled aluminum can and a new aluminum can are equally damaging to the environment in terms of energy production.
But does that mean they are equally damaging to the environment, period? What about the actual materials used? Surely we cannot assume that energy production is the only factor that determines environmental damage. The fact that a recycled can’s aluminum came from other cans and not aluminum mines has to count for something.
The reasoning here is cost-benefit analysis, and the author failed to consider other costs and benefits. The argument accounted for energy production as a component of environmental damage but forgot to account for other components. We’re not looking at causal reasoning.
Since we spotted the flaw, let’s turn to the answer choices.
Answer Choice (B) says that the argument treats an effect of energy-related damage as if it were instead the cause of such damage. What is the effect of energy-related damage? Maybe we will see 80-degree weather in New York on Christmas, but why is this relevant? The argument is not even close to a causal one and (B) does not describe the argument’s flaw.
Answer Choice (E) says that the argument presumes that simply because one phenomenon follows another, the earlier must be a cause of the later. Both (B) and (E) describe cookie-cutter flaws related to causation, and if such flaws were actually present in the argument, they would be the right answer choice. But (E) has nothing to do with this argument.
Answer Choice (A) says that the argument uses the word “environment” in one sense in the premise and in a different sense in the conclusion. (A) describes another cookie-cutter flaw that could be correct in other questions, but not in this one. It accuses the argument of having shifted the meaning of a key term or phrase, but it is clear that the premise and the conclusion are referring to the same concept of environment.
Answer Choice (C) says that the argument fails to consider that the particular types of recycled products that it cites may not be representative of recycled products in general. However, the columnist explicitly said making some types of products from recycled material is probably as damaging, not that recycling is just as damaging in general as making products from new materials. And surely the columnist never cited any particular types of products. While I used soda cans to illustrate the argument, the columnist’s argument was nonspecific.
Answer Choice (D) says that the argument fails to consider that making products from recycled materials may have environmental benefits unrelated to energy consumption. This successfully picks up on the accounting error we spotted earlier. This is a benefit of recycling that the argument failed to account for.
A
It is presented as an example of the sort of warning referred to in the argument’s overall conclusion.
B
It is a statement that plays no logical role in the argument but that instead serves to impugn the motives of the medical establishment.
C
It is an analogy offered in support of the argument’s overall conclusion.
D
It is an analogy that forms part of a specific objection to the argument’s overall conclusion.
E
It is an analogy offered to clarify the distinction the physician makes between an initial study and a definitive study.
This is a Flaw/Descriptive Weakening question.
The stimulus says that a club wanted to determine whether it could increase attendance by changing its weekly meeting from Tuesday to another day. So at one Tuesday meeting, the club's president took a survey of all members present, and 95% said they had no difficulty attending on Tuesdays. The club president therefore concluded that the attendance problem was not due to scheduling conflicts.
This is strange. Why did the president survey the members already present at a Tuesday meeting on whether Tuesday is a good day? They already showed up to the meeting, so Tuesday is obviously a convenient day for them. And while you can say that the Tuesday meeting was not an issue for the Tuesday attendees, you cannot draw the same conclusion about all members. This is the big flaw in the argument. The members present on Tuesday are an unrepresentative sample, and they specifically do not represent the people who were not present on Tuesday.
Here is a helpful analogy. Say I am an ice cream shop owner who only sells vanilla ice cream and I want to increase my revenue by possibly changing my flavor to chocolate or strawberry. So I survey all of my customers and 95% say they have no problem with the vanilla flavor. I therefore decide that my revenue problem is not due to the flavoring of the ice cream. What a silly argument, right? I am asking people who are already buying my vanilla ice cream if vanilla flavor is the issue. The customers surveyed are not representative of people who are not yet my customers.
Answer Choice (B) says that the reasoning makes a generalization on the basis of a sample that is likely to be unrepresentative. (B) picks up on the cookie-cutter flaw above. The club president makes a generalization about all members on the basis of an unrepresentative sample, the members who had no problem showing up on Tuesdays.
Answer Choice (A) says that the reasoning draws a conclusion on the basis of circular reasoning. This is not an instance of circular reasoning. Circular reasoning has conclusions and premises that effectively say the same thing, such as “I am the best because no one in the world is better than me.”
If you picked (A), you might have thought that the argument uses circular reasoning because of the repeated use of Tuesday meeting attendance. However, circular reasoning would look something like “the attendance problem is not due to scheduling conflicts because scheduling conflicts do not create attendance problems.” The stimulus instead has distinct premise and conclusion claims.
Answer Choice (C) says that the reasoning treats a generalization that applies to most cases as if it applied without exception. But the conclusion explicitly accounts for possible exclusions because it says the attendance problem was not due primarily to scheduling conflicts. For (C) to be correct, the argument would have to say that since most members of our club said that weekend meetings are okay, weekend meetings are okay for everybody in our club.
Answer Choice (D) says the reasoning draws a conclusion on the basis of premises that contradict one another. The stimulus does draw a conclusion, but there are no premises that contradict one another.
To contradict the first premise, we have to say that a club does not want to figure out if it could increase attendance by changing its weekly meeting. To contradict the next premise, we have to say that at one Tuesday meeting, the club president did not take a survey. To contradict the last premise, we have to say that of those surveyed, 95% said that they did have difficulty with a Tuesday meeting. None of these contradictory statements are present in the stimulus.
Answer Choice (E) is the oldest mistake in the book. It says that the club president’s reasoning is inferring, solely from the claim that a change is not sufficient to solve a problem, that it is not necessary either.
Let's illustrate what the argument would have to look like for (E) to be correct. A club has decided that it wants to double its attendance. It realized that if they move their meetings from Tuesdays to Fridays, their attendance will increase by only 10%. Since this change is not sufficient, it concluded that it is not necessary either.
That’s sufficiency necessity confusion. It’s a flaw because it’s possible that moving the meeting to Friday, while insufficient, is actually necessary. For example, perhaps providing free beer on Fridays will supply the remaining 90% increase. While neither change is independently sufficient, both are necessary.