PrepTest 105, Section 4, Question 18
In a study in which secondary school students(49 more words not shown)
Which one of the following,(6 more words not shown)
- APeople with the(9 more words not shown)
- BPeople with the(13 more words not shown)
- CStudents of teachers(10 more words not shown)
- DStudents with the(16 more words not shown)
- ETeachers with the(14 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Students especially like these teachers, but people with that personality make up only 5 percent of teachers and 20 percent of the public. Why the difference?
Maybe their rarity helps explain why students like them. A teacher who behaves differently from everyone else might be a welcome change. Or perhaps these people are especially likable in general and can earn more in another profession, such as sales. Those are possibilities, not facts supplied by the study.
The author chooses an explanation: something discourages these people from entering teaching. That sounds plausible, but have we ruled out other explanations for the low percentage? I wonder whether they apply and simply don't get hired. Maybe the personality that students enjoy comes across poorly in interviews.
What we’re looking for
That's not a perfect objection. Barriers to getting hired could themselves discourage people from entering the profession. I don't yet have a clean alternative, and I shouldn't pretend otherwise. For this weaken question, I'll look for a fact showing why the small percentage of current teachers doesn't establish the author's story about entering the job.
Working the answers
- A
Their percentage among doctors doesn't explain their percentage among teachers. We could now ask a similar question about medicine, but that adds another fact to explain. It doesn't challenge the proposed explanation for teaching.
- B
The same low percentage among education students fits the idea that relatively few people with this personality pursue teaching. It doesn't tell us why that happens. Finding the pattern at an earlier stage supplies no competing explanation and gives us no reason to reject discouragement.
- C
Read who gets recruited: the students of these teachers. Those students need not have their teachers' personality type. Recruitment into other careers therefore doesn't explain the low percentage of teachers with the personality. Even if it did draw such people away from teaching, that would give us a possible discouragement from entering the profession, which fits the argument instead of weakening it.
- D
This changes who's liking whom. Teachers like students with the personality, but the argument concerns why people with that personality are underrepresented among teachers. Another observation about likability doesn't explain the career pattern.
- ECorrect
They may enter teaching and then leave. That's a much better alternative than my initial guess about hiring: it challenges the move from who is currently teaching to who enters the profession.
Imagine many people with this personality start teaching, but a larger share of them quit after a short time. Teachers with other personalities stay longer and accumulate in the profession. The first personality could then be common among new hires yet uncommon among current teachers.
E doesn't establish an exact entry rate or explain why anyone quits. It gives us a different process that could produce the 5-percent figure. We can no longer treat that figure as establishing that these people were discouraged from entering.
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