PrepTest 119, Section 4, Question 12
Several legislators claim that the public finds many(64 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the argument(6 more words not shown)
- Aattempts to undermine(8 more words not shown)
- Bbases its conclusion(12 more words not shown)
- Cfails to consider(11 more words not shown)
- Dgeneralizes from a(10 more words not shown)
- Epresumes, without providing(14 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Who keeps going to the movies? Probably not the people who find so many of them intolerably offensive.
The author wants to disprove a claim about public opinion by citing a survey. Only a small proportion of respondents objected to movie violence or found a recent movie morally offensive. That could tell us something about the people surveyed. But do they represent the public?
The final sentence gives me the reason to worry. These respondents see far more current movies than the average moviegoer. The author treats that as a strength: they've seen more movies, so their low objection rate must be telling. Yet their willingness to attend so often may be connected to their tolerance for what is on screen. People who dislike violent movies might go less often or stay away altogether.
What we’re looking for
For the flaw question, I'd identify the jump from unusually frequent moviegoers to the public as a whole. We don't have to prove the legislators right. We need to explain why this particular survey doesn't settle whether they've accurately described public sentiment.
Working the answers
- A
The author challenges the legislators with survey evidence, not a personal attack. Saying that someone has misrepresented public opinion isn't itself an attack on their character in place of an argument. The problem lies in the evidence used to support that accusation.
- B
The conclusion concerns what the public finds offensive, so people's subjective judgments are exactly what a relevant survey would investigate. We don't need an objective definition of moral offensiveness to find out what people think. We need a sample whose responses can reasonably represent the public's opinions.
- C
Whether violent movies increase antisocial behavior is a different question from whether the public finds them morally offensive. People could object to the films whether or not the films cause such behavior. The argument's error concerns whose opinions were measured.
- DCorrect
Frequent moviegoers may be more comfortable with current movies than the public generally. Using their responses to dismiss a claim about public opinion treats that potentially unusual group as representative. The author even highlights the characteristic that gives us reason to question the sample.
- E
This shifts attention from the people sampled to the movies they watched. The argument doesn't require respondents to have seen a randomly selected set of films. The central problem remains even if we know exactly which films they saw: unusually frequent moviegoers may not reflect public sentiment.
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