PrepTest 118, Section 3, Question 13
Harrold Foods is attempting to dominate the soft-drink(77 more words not shown)
The argument commits which one(6 more words not shown)
- Afailing to exclude(23 more words not shown)
- Bmistaking a condition(20 more words not shown)
- Ctreating the failure(18 more words not shown)
- Dtaking evidence that(17 more words not shown)
- Edescribing survey results(18 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Seventy-two percent of consumers think Hero dominates. That isn't the same as Hero having 72 percent of the sales.
An advertising campaign might get someone to try a drink. I've tried unfamiliar products after seeing them in the media. But trying one bottle isn't necessarily the beginning of a lasting habit: if I don't like it, I might never buy it again. So I wouldn't assume that advertising will produce market dominance.
The author takes a different route, though: apparently the campaign is unnecessary because Hero already dominates. Where are the sales figures? We're given people's opinions, then a definition based on actual sales. Consumers could hear about Hero constantly and think it is the biggest seller even if another drink outsells it.
What we’re looking for
For the flaw question, keep those measurements separate. The percentage of people believing a claim doesn't establish the sales percentage that would make the claim true.
Working the answers
- A
This describes switching a cause and its effect. Our problem isn't whether advertising causes dominance or dominance causes advertising. It's whether consumers' beliefs establish actual market share. A doesn't describe that move from opinion to fact.
- B
The passage does give a condition: more than half the sales makes a product dominant. But the argument doesn't mistakenly treat a required condition as enough on its own. It hasn't established that Hero meets the sales condition at all. It offers survey opinions instead of sales numbers. That's the mistake to identify.
- C
The author doesn't say that nobody has disproved Hero's dominance and therefore it must be dominant. The author offers a particular piece of evidence—the survey—and gives it more force than it deserves. Using the wrong support differs from taking a failure to disprove something as proof.
- DCorrect
The survey shows that people believe Hero dominates the market. The author treats that as establishing that it actually does. But the consumers could be mistaken about sales.
Even widespread recognition or a strong impression of popularity doesn't tell us whether Hero accounts for more than half the purchases. We don't have to show that Hero lacks dominance. We just have to see that the evidence doesn't establish the dominance the argument assumes.
- E
The passage does discuss continuing to dominate, but its recommendation is conditional on maintaining the current market share. It doesn't claim that today's survey results are bound to remain unchanged. The earlier problem is already decisive: we don't know from this survey that Hero currently has the required share. E targets persistence over time rather than the opinion-to-sales jump.
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