PT146.S3.Q23 > Explanation

SECTION 1 · lr

Question 1 Question 2 Question 3 Question 4 Question 5 Question 6 Question 7 Question 8 Question 9 Question 10 Question 11 Question 12 Question 13 Question 14 Question 15 Question 16 Question 17 Question 18 Question 19 Question 20 Question 21 Question 22 Question 23 Question 24 Question 25

SECTION 2 · lr

SECTION 3 · lr

SECTION 4 · rc

PASSAGE 1

Question 1 Question 2 Question 3 Question 4 Question 5 Question 6

PASSAGE 2

Question 7 Question 8 Question 9 Question 10 Question 11 Question 12 Question 13 Question 14

PASSAGE 3

Question 15 Question 16 Question 17 Question 18 Question 19 Question 20 Question 21 Question 22

PASSAGE 4

Question 23 Question 24 Question 25 Question 26 Question 27

Whether the reasons for performing maintenance were good ones, bad ones, routine ones, special ones, red ones, or blue ones doesn’t impact the businessperson’s argument that if the maintenance weren’t happening on that day, they wouldn’t have been late.

Working out why this answer choice is wrong was quite difficult even for us, but the reasoning is solid in the end: B impacts the causal chain running from (1) parking issues to (3) lateness. That chain is firmly established in the premises.

If no one else was late due to parking issues, we might question whether the businessperson is telling the truth about (1) having trouble parking, or whether the parking issues described in their sob story really required (2) 15 whole minutes to address. Neither of these claims is open to question – both must be taken as true from the start.

Correct. If the parking area is full every day, the businessperson’s tragic parking adventure would have happened even if there had been no maintenance. This weakens the argument without questioning the causal chain that (1) parking issues caused (2) extra time looking for parking caused (3) being late to the meeting.

It addresses the gap between (0) maintenance being done on that day and (1) parking issues.

The premises establish that our businessperson was only (3) a few minutes late to today’s meeting. Even if they’re late almost every day, on this particular day spending 15 extra minutes was in fact a potential difference-maker.

On the flipside, saying the businessperson is very rarely late to meetings simply lends credibility to the causal chain already established in the premises that on this particular day (1) parking issues caused (2) extra time looking for parking caused (3) being late to the meeting. See B for more detail on this line of reasoning.

If showing up on time to this meeting was super-duper important, that would raise the stakes of the businessperson’s tardiness. It would not, however, address the issue of whether it was the maintenance that caused the tardiness. Same thing on the flipside – if showing up on time today was no big deal, that lowers the stakes without addressing the core causal argument.

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PrepTest 146 - Section 3 - Question 23

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