PrepTest 111, Section 3, Question 13
President of the Regional Chamber of Commerce: We(87 more words not shown)
The argument is most vulnerable(7 more words not shown)
- Afocuses on what(17 more words not shown)
- Bconfuses a claim(18 more words not shown)
- Cargues against a(14 more words not shown)
- Dtreats a claim(22 more words not shown)
- Eattacks what was(12 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
What if businesses only started leaving at that rate last month?
Almost no new businesses have arrived for ten years. That makes me wonder whether the problem is local or part of a broader economic decline, but it doesn't yet tell us how quickly existing businesses are leaving. The Planning Board says the current rate is about four per week. Why should we reject that estimate?
The president says the region never had more than about a thousand businesses, so four departures a week would have emptied it long ago. I can see the arithmetic if that rate continued for years. At four a week, about 208 would leave in a year; roughly five years would exhaust a thousand businesses if none replaced them.
But the board hasn't said the rate lasted five years, much less the entire decade. If it began four weeks ago, only about sixteen businesses would have left at that pace. There could still be hundreds in the region.
What we’re looking for
That's the flaw to look for: a claim about the current rate is being treated as a claim about a long-running trend. The president needs the duration before using the rate to argue that all the businesses should already be gone.
Working the answers
- A
The president does address incoming businesses: almost none have moved in or started up over the past decade. So the argument doesn't simply ignore what enters the system. The missing information concerns how long the reported departure rate has lasted.
- B
A rate and a starting number can legitimately be used together. If we knew there were 1,000 businesses, four left every week for years, and almost none arrived, we could estimate how many should remain. The problem isn't confusing the rate with the total number. It's assuming the present rate has continued long enough to exhaust that number.
- C
The president doesn't discuss whether the Planning Board benefits from exaggerating the problem. The attempted rebuttal uses the number of businesses and the departure rate. C describes a criticism of the board's motives that the argument never makes.
- DCorrect
The board describes what is happening now, while the president's objection requires it to have been happening for an extended period. A recent surge in departures could produce a current rate of four per week without having emptied the region. The argument fails to consider that change over time.
- E
The president challenges the estimate as an exaggeration, not because it lacks precision. The argument doesn't complain that 'about four' is too vague or insist on an exact count. It tries to show the rate is implausible by projecting it backward over time.
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