PrepTest 109, Section 1, Question 12
A nationwide poll of students, parents, and teachers(42 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(10 more words not shown)
- AThe argument confuses(7 more words not shown)
- BThe argument confuses(17 more words not shown)
- CThe argument fails(21 more words not shown)
- DThe argument fails(15 more words not shown)
- EThe argument fails(21 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Do these opinions tell us what the counseling program actually needs? More than ninety percent of the people surveyed approve of its share of the budget, but popularity alone doesn't establish that a funding decision is sound. A student could have a strong opinion without knowing much about the counseling budget. That doesn't make the student wrong; it makes me want more support before treating the opinion as decisive.
What we’re looking for
The author nevertheless uses this approval to say that all of a significant budget increase should go elsewhere. For the flaw question, my first concern is that reliance on the poll: have we established that these opinions should determine the funding? That's what I'd initially look for. We should still check whether an answer identifies another mistake in the move from the poll to the recommendation.
Working the answers
- A
There is no observed coincidence being mistaken for evidence that one event caused another. The author takes approval expressed in a poll and uses it to recommend how to allocate money. Calling that a causal error doesn't explain what goes wrong in this argument.
- BCorrect
This catches something more specific than my initial concern about whose opinions we should trust. The poll approves a percentage of the budget. The conclusion would freeze the amount spent on counseling while the total budget grows. Those aren't the same thing.
Suppose the school has a budget of one hundred units and spends twenty on counseling. Counseling gets twenty percent. Now the budget doubles to two hundred units. If every new unit goes to other programs, counseling still gets twenty units, but that is now only ten percent of the budget.
To keep the approved twenty-percent share, counseling would need forty units out of the new two-hundred-unit budget. So even if we fully accept the poll's judgment, it doesn't support directing the entire increase elsewhere. That plan would change the very percentage the respondents approved. B gives us a concrete mistake the argument makes, even though it wasn't my first prediction.
- C
This would fit a claim such as, “Counseling has enough funding, so the whole school has enough funding.” Our author doesn't make that claim. The conclusion addresses where an increase should go, not whether every part of the existing budget is appropriate. The problem is percentage versus amount, not transferring a judgment about one part to the whole.
- D
Perhaps peer counselors could save money. That possibility doesn't explain the error in using approval of the current percentage to allocate a larger budget. An argument leaves out countless possible cost-saving ideas; leaving one out isn't automatically a flaw. We need to show why its stated support fails to justify its recommendation.
- E
The budget is increasing, so more money could go to counseling and to other programs. In our example, raising counseling from twenty to forty units would still leave eighty additional units for everything else. E treats the choice as though giving more to one program prevents every other program from receiving more. The passage gives us no reason to impose that restriction.
More Flaw questions
Learn the LSAT our way
Our platform drills Flaw questions at your level and adjusts as you improve.