Thelma: This glut of middle-aged workers will lead many people to form their own companies. They will work hard and thus increase economic productivity, improving the quality of life even if many of the companies ultimately fail.
Speaker 1 Summary
Claude concludes that economic productivity and the quality of life will diminish. This is because of a causal chain: the high number of middle-aged people in the workforce will lead to fewer opportunities for promotions, which will decrease people’s incentive to work hard.
Speaker 2 Summary
Thelma concludes that quality of life will improve. This is because of her own causal chain: the large number of middle-aged workers will lead people to form new companies, which will lead those people to work hard, which will increase economic productivity.
Objective
We’re looking for a point of agreement. The speakers agree that there’s a high number of middle-aged people in the workforce and that this can influence people’s decisions regarding work.
A
The quality of life in a society affects that society’s economic productivity.
Neither speaker expresses an opinion. Claude doesn’t indicate a causal relationship between economic productivity and quality of life. Thelma indicates that more economic productivity will improve quality of life, but doesn’t say the relationship can be reversed.
B
The failure of many companies will not necessarily have a negative effect on overall economic productivity.
Claude expresses no opinion. He doesn’t discuss failing companies.
C
How hard a company’s employees work is a function of what they think their chances for promotion are in that company.
Thelma expresses no opinion. She doesn’t discuss promotions or how people react based on their perception of chances of promotion. She does believe people will form their own companies, but that doesn’t mean this decision is influenced by the chances of promotion.
D
The number of middle-aged people in the workforce will increase in the coming years.
Neither expresses an opinion. They both agree that there currently is a high number of middle-aged people in the workforce, but they don’t speak to whether the number of these people will increase in the future.
E
Economic productivity will be affected by the number of middle-aged people in the workforce.
This is a point of agreement. The speakers disagree about whether productivity will go up (Thelma thinks this) or down (Claude thinks this), but they both agree that there will be some effect on productivity from the number of middle-aged people in the workforce.
Summarize Argument: Phenomenon-Hypothesis
The author concludes that producing characters more automatically frees up mental resources for other activities. This is based on a study of 100 first-graders who received after-school lessons in handwriting, which showed that those whose composition skills had improved the most had learned to write letters the most automatically.
Notable Assumptions
The author assumes that in the study, the improvement in how automatically students could write letters contributed to improved composition skills. The author also assumes that the mechanism underlying this relationship was that writing letters more automatically freed up mental resources that could be used for composition. Another assumption is that the correlation observed among the students who composition skills had improved the most also existed for other students who had improved their composition skills.
A
Among the first-graders who received the after-school lessons in handwriting, those who practiced the most learned to write letters the most automatically.
(A) tells us why the students who learned to write letters most automatically were able to do so. But this doesn’t help connect writing letters automatically to improved composition skills.
B
The first-graders who wrote letters the most automatically before receiving the after-school lessons in handwriting showed the greatest improvement in their composition skills over the course of the lessons.
We already know there’s a correlation in the study between the most improved composition skills and learning to write letters the most automatically. (B) doesn’t reveal any new information that suggests a causal connection.
C
Over the course of the lessons, the first-graders who showed greater improvement in their ability to write letters automatically also generally showed greater improvement in their composition skills.
This strengthens by showing that the correlation observed among the ones who had learned to write letters the most automatically was also observed among the broader group.
D
Before receiving the after-school lessons in handwriting, the 100 first-graders who received the lessons were representative of first-graders more generally, with respect to their skills in both handwriting and composition.
Representativeness wasn’t an issue because the author’ didn’t assert that every first-grader could achieve the same results observed in the experiment. The conclusion was simply that there’s a causal relationship between writing letters more automatically and freeing mental resources.
E
Among the first-graders who received the lessons in handwriting, those who started out with strong composition skills showed substantial improvement in how automatically they could write letters.
We already know there’s a correlation in the study between the most improved composition skills and learning to write letters the most automatically. (E) doesn’t reveal any new information that suggests a causal connection.
Summary
Fiber-optic telephone cables are more expensive to make than copper cable. Networks using fiber-optic cables are less expensive overall than copper. This is because copper cables require frequent amplification of electrical signals to travel long distances, whereas fiber-optic cables use light pulses that travel farther before requiring amplification.
Strongly Supported Conclusions
Savings from switching to fiber-optic cables from copper cables exceeds the greater manufacturing cost.
A
The material from which fiber-optic cable is manufactured is more expensive than the copper from which copper cable is made.
This is unsupported because while we know it is more expensive to manufacture fiber-optic cable, we don’t know if this is directly due to the price of materials or some other part of the manufacturing process.
B
The increase in the number of transmissions of complex signals through telephone cables is straining those telephone networks that still use copper cable.
This is unsupported because while we know that it is more expensive to send signals long distance with copper, we don’t know that it necessarily puts more strain on the networks.
C
Fiber-optic cable can carry many more signals simultaneously than copper cable can.
This is unsupported because we are not told anything about the quantity of signals that each type of cable can carry.
D
Signals transmitted through fiber-optic cable travel at the same speed as signals transmitted through copper cable.
This is unsupported because the author only tells us about the cost, not about the speed of transmitting signals on each type of cable.
E
The cost associated with frequent amplification of signals traveling through copper cable exceeds the extra manufacturing cost of fiber-optic cable.
This is strongly supported because the author states that switching to fiber-optic cables can save money overall despite the greater cost associated with manufacturing fiber optic cables.