PrepTest 102, Section 4, Question 2
Twenty professional income-tax advisors were given identical records(41 more words not shown)
If the information above is(16 more words not shown)
- AOnly one out(15 more words not shown)
- BThe fact that(22 more words not shown)
- CIn order to(17 more words not shown)
- DAll professional income-tax(13 more words not shown)
- EPeople are more(23 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Twenty professionals receive the same records. Would you expect twenty different tax returns? I would at least expect agreement about what the records require. Instead, every return differs, and nineteen of the twenty are technically wrong. Maybe the tax rules are complicated. Maybe some advisors made avoidable mistakes. The passage doesn't establish why this happened, so let's separate those possible explanations from the result we actually know.
The advisors didn't realize these were fictitious records. Nothing here says they knowingly treated the work as a meaningless exercise. Even so, professional preparation failed to produce a correct return in nineteen cases.
What we’re looking for
For the inference question, stay close to that observation. We can say professional advisors don't always agree, and being a professional doesn't ensure a correct result. We should hesitate before turning one assignment for twenty people into a rule about every assignment every advisor completes.
Working the answers
- A
One correct return out of these twenty doesn't establish a five-percent success rate for each advisor. Imagine that the successful advisor gets every return right and the other nineteen made mistakes on this particular assignment. That would fit what we know without giving every advisor the same success rate. A changes a result across twenty people into a prediction about each person's future work.
- BCorrect
Nineteen professionally prepared returns were wrong. Those cases are enough to show that professional preparation doesn't guarantee correctness. We don't have to know the overall error rate or explain each mistake. A guarantee would allow no failures, and the passage gives us failures.
- C
The passage doesn't show that a return must be professionally prepared to be correct. Someone doing their own taxes might get them right. All the example establishes is that professional preparation can produce an incorrect return; it doesn't establish that correct preparation is impossible without a professional.
- D
We know nineteen of these advisors made a mistake here. What about the twentieth? That person might never make a mistake, and advisors outside the group might have perfect records too. Those possibilities aren't established, but they remain open. D needs a claim about every professional, whereas B only needs the demonstrated fact that hiring a professional isn't a guarantee.
- E
There is no comparison with people preparing their own returns. They might do better, worse, or just as well on these records. The professionals' mistakes alone don't tell us the relative likelihood of an error under the two approaches. We shouldn't turn this experiment into advice about which approach performs better.
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