PrepTest 109, Section 1, Question 24
Supervisor: Our next budget proposal will probably be(27 more words not shown)
The supervisor's reasoning is flawed(7 more words not shown)
- Athe last five(16 more words not shown)
- Bthe vice president(12 more words not shown)
- Chaving the last(17 more words not shown)
- Dthe majority of(10 more words not shown)
- Ethe likelihood that(17 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Are we due for an approval? Five rejections don't, by themselves, make the next proposal more likely to succeed.
Imagine flipping a fair coin five times and getting tails every time. Heads isn't owed to us on the sixth flip. Each new flip still has the same chance of heads. The earlier run doesn't create a debt that the next flip must pay back.
Budget decisions aren't literally coin flips, so we should ask what actually connects them. Does the vice president have a policy of approving a proposal after five rejections? Nothing says so. We only have a normal overall approval rate. That doesn't establish that this team's next proposal gets a boost because its previous five failed.
There is another possibility worth considering: perhaps the earlier proposals were poor. If the team keeps submitting similar proposals, the record might be a reason for concern, not confidence. We don't know their quality, but we shouldn't assume a rejection streak must soon reverse.
What we’re looking for
The flaw question should target the unsupported connection. The supervisor treats those five rejections as a reason to expect better odds on the next proposal. I'd look for an answer describing that assumption without making the supervisor's claim stronger than “probably.”
Working the answers
- A
This goes too far in two ways. The supervisor predicts that the next proposal will probably be approved. A turns probability into a guarantee and one proposal into the next five proposals. It resembles the mistake, but it doesn't accurately describe what the supervisor assumes.
- B
A normal approval rate is not a requirement to approve at least half. The supervisor cites what normally happens, not a rule the vice president must satisfy. We shouldn't invent that stronger obligation and then attribute it to the supervisor.
- CCorrect
The supervisor uses the five rejections to change the outlook for the next proposal. But no reason is supplied for thinking that this past sequence affects the next decision in the favorable way the supervisor expects.
An overall rate of about half doesn't mean each team's rejections must be balanced by upcoming approvals. We'd need information about the decision process or the new proposal to justify that expectation.
- D
That was one of our possible concerns, not an assumption the supervisor makes. We wondered whether the earlier proposals might have been bad. The supervisor never assesses their merits and doesn't base the conclusion on their deserving rejection.
- E
The requested amount might matter in real budget decisions, but the supervisor gives no information about it. The argument relies on the approval rate and the sequence of earlier rejections. E identifies a possible influence we haven't been told about, not the assumption driving this forecast.
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