PrepTest 115, Section 4, Question 21
In a small town, every complaint filed about(34 more words not shown)
The argument is questionable because(4 more words not shown)
- Athe interests of(7 more words not shown)
- Bthat there may(10 more words not shown)
- Cwhether Moore's business(10 more words not shown)
- Dthe number of(10 more words not shown)
- Ewhether each person(11 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
What if Moore is the only plumber in town? Then every plumbing complaint would be about Moore, even if there were only one complaint and it came from a customer whose expectations were unreasonable. The town being small makes that possibility easy to picture. A relatively small business could still be the town's only plumbing business.
The evidence tells us where the complaints went. It doesn't tell us how many there were or whether they provide a fair picture of Moore's work. If there is no other plumber to complain about, the concentration of complaints isn't the comparison the author seems to think it is.
What we’re looking for
For the flaw question, I'd look for that missing possibility: there may be nobody else, or almost nobody else, doing plumbing work in the town. We don't have to prove Moore is good. We just need to explain why getting all the complaints doesn't establish that Moore is unreliable.
Working the answers
- A
Customers' interests aren't a measure of how well Moore did the plumbing. We might want to know whether satisfied customers greatly outnumber dissatisfied ones, but A doesn't supply their satisfaction or a complaint rate. It asks about the interests of people who didn't complain. Don't turn that into the stronger, different information we'd need.
- BCorrect
If Moore is the only plumber, every plumbing complaint must be about Moore. That could happen even with very little dissatisfaction overall. If there are only a few other plumbers, we would still need to know how much work each does before treating complaint concentration as a fair comparison.
Think of a town's only restaurant receiving every complaint about restaurant meals—and also every compliment about them. Neither fact, by itself, establishes that its food is bad or good. With nobody else in the category, all the feedback goes to the same place. The missing comparison is what makes the author's evidence weak.
- C
A small business can do consistently bad work, and a large one can do good work. Business size alone doesn't decide whether a conclusion about reliability is justified. The relevant missing information is whether there are other plumbers to generate complaints, not whether a small business is automatically beyond evaluation.
- D
Complaints about carpenters or electricians wouldn't tell us whether Moore's plumbing is reliable. The author doesn't compare Moore with every kind of tradesperson. Our objection concerns the pool of plumbers behind the evidence actually offered.
- E
We don't need every dissatisfied customer to file a complaint before complaints can provide evidence about work quality. There could be unreported dissatisfaction, but that would not resolve whether all the recorded complaints point to Moore simply because Moore is the only plumber. E doesn't identify the missing comparison behind the inference.
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