PrepTest 112, Section 3, Question 22
The retail price of decaffeinated coffee is considerably(41 more words not shown)
The argument relies on assuming(5 more words not shown)
- AProcessing regular coffee(6 more words not shown)
- BPrice differences between(19 more words not shown)
- CThere is little(7 more words not shown)
- DRetail coffee-sellers do(16 more words not shown)
- EThe beans used(19 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Removing the caffeine is cheap. What about everything else needed to get the coffee to the customer?
At first, the higher price makes me wonder whether decaffeination is an expensive extra step. The passage tells us it isn't. Fine—we should accept that and look elsewhere. But the author moves from the cost of that particular process to the whole cost of providing decaf coffee. Those aren't necessarily the same.
Imagine the beans have to travel to a separate decaffeination facility and then to a packaging facility. The work inside the first facility might be cheap while the extra transport is expensive. That's only a possible explanation, but it shows why one inexpensive stage doesn't establish that the whole supply process is inexpensive.
What we’re looking for
The question asks for an assumption the argument needs. I'd expect the author to rule out some other substantial cost that could explain the price difference. We don't need to show what actually makes decaf more expensive; we need to identify a possibility the author's conclusion depends on excluding.
Working the answers
- A
Regular coffee needn't cost more to process for the argument to work. The two processing costs could be similar, with a large retail price difference that the author attributes to something other than the cost of providing the coffee. A demands a particular ordering of processing costs that isn't required.
- B
The conclusion concerns this price difference. The author doesn't need a general rule that product prices are usually explained by supply and demand rather than production costs. Costs could explain many other price differences while failing to explain this one. B is a much broader economic claim than the argument requires.
- C
Limited competition might help explain high prices, but the author hasn't committed to that explanation. The conclusion could be true whether there are few competitors or many. An available explanation for the price doesn't automatically become something the argument must assume.
- D
The argument doesn't require this belief about sellers' expectations. Sellers might think buyers will happily pay more for decaf, and that could help explain a higher price without a matching increase in costs. D is not needed to reject a cost-based explanation.
- ECorrect
This points to a different extra cost from the shipping example: the beans before processing. If those beans cost much more, providing decaf could be substantially more expensive even though removing the caffeine is cheap.
The author needs to rule that out. E says the starting beans don't cost much more, closing one route by which the total cost could explain the price difference. It doesn't settle every possible cost, but a required assumption needn't repair every gap at once.
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