PrepTest 120, Section 3, Question 25
A corporation created a new division.(46 more words not shown)
The flawed pattern of reasoning(15 more words not shown)
- AIn order to(49 more words not shown)
- BSeveral salespeople were(46 more words not shown)
- CA law firm(76 more words not shown)
- DTo put together(60 more words not shown)
- EVarious schools chose(50 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
What if these excellent employees can't work together? Maybe they constantly disagree, duplicate each other's work, or wait for someone else to make decisions. A poorly organized division could waste the talents of people who perform very well individually. An established division with less impressive individual résumés might have much better ways of coordinating the work.
The passage gives us unusually effective, efficient, and creative employees. We don't need to challenge the interviewing process or pretend the employees aren't good. The unsupported step is transferring their qualities to the division they form. The quality of the individual workers doesn't guarantee the same quality of the combined operation.
What we’re looking for
For the parallel flaw, look for excellent members being used to guarantee an excellent group. The subject could change completely. Another answer about creating a business department could still make a different mistake.
Working the answers
- A
Choosing one person from each of the six best teams doesn't guarantee choosing the six best players. One team might contain two of those players, so the selection rule would miss one. That's a problem with how the individuals are selected.
Our argument already gives us excellent individuals and then judges their combined division. A instead uses team rankings to draw a conclusion about the selected individuals. It doesn't make the same move from excellent members to an excellent group.
- B
One successful salesperson doesn't establish that the incentive program worked. Perhaps that person would have exceeded the goal anyway, or other salespeople failed to improve. But the conclusion concerns the program's effectiveness. It doesn't combine individually excellent people and assume the resulting group must be excellent.
- C
The new department makes this look familiar, but check the actual evidence. These employees have training and aptitudes resembling those of successful firms. We aren't told that the new individual employees are themselves among the best.
C relies on copying features of other successful operations to predict the new department's success. The original relies directly on the excellence of its own individual hires. Shared business vocabulary doesn't make those supporting moves the same.
- DCorrect
The selected players correspond to the employees, and the All-Star Teams correspond to the division. Each player is among the best individually, just as each selected employee has the exceptional qualities described. Then those individual rankings are used to conclude that the assembled teams are best.
But talented players might compete for the same role or fail to cooperate. Their individual quality doesn't guarantee the team's quality, just as talented employees might form a disorganized division. Having two teams instead of one division doesn't change that mistake.
- E
The evidence is about teams performing as teams in a tournament, and the conclusion ranks a team using that performance. It doesn't start with the qualities of individual debaters and transfer them to a group. Whether the scoring system is a good measure of overall quality would be another issue; it isn't the mistake we're matching.
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