PrepTest 114, Section 2, Question 18

What we’re looking for

Working the answers

• A
  Correct

  Put the requirements in the original argument's order: performing difficult music requires musical skill. Developing that skill requires long hours of practice. So the three positions are performing difficult music, developing skill, and practicing for long hours.

  Now compare them with science, measuring, and choosing units. Practice is tedious, just as choosing units is arbitrary. The conclusion then calls performing difficult music tedious, just as the original calls science arbitrary. In both arguments, a property of the last required step is carried back to the starting activity without establishing that it carries over.

  A gives the practice requirement before the performance requirement, so reading it in sentence order can obscure the match. Rearranging the relationships shows the same chain. Tedious preparation doesn't by itself mean a performance is tedious, just as arbitrary unit selection doesn't make science arbitrary.

• B

  This has only one required step: an expanding business needs advertising. Advertising is expensive, and the conclusion transfers that expense to running a business. It resembles the property transfer but lacks the second requirement in the original chain.

  There is another difference: the premise concerns an expanding business, while the conclusion concerns a business generally. The original doesn't drop a comparable limit on the activity. B doesn't reproduce the full pattern.

• C

  Sitting on a bench requires getting to it, but walking on the grass is only one way to get there. It isn't presented as something every route requires. Also, permission starts with the end activity—sitting—and is passed to one possible route. The original starts with a property of the final required step and passes it back to science. C changes both the kind of link and the direction of the property transfer.

• D

  Being a manager requires evaluating people. The next claim describes evaluation as subjective; it doesn't add a further activity required for evaluation. The conclusion then concerns people's resentment of managers, based on their resentment of subjective evaluation. It doesn't simply assign the evaluation's property to management through the original two-step chain.

• E

  This argument concerns a limited supply needed to sustain an activity. Irrigated farming uses aquifer water; continued pumping will exhaust that supply; therefore continuing indefinitely requires another water source. That is a forecast about replacing an exhausted resource. It doesn't take a property of the water source and conclude that farming itself has that property, so the defining final move is missing.