PrepTest 125, Section 2, Question 3
Statistics from the National Booksellers Association indicate that(36 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(8 more words not shown)
- AMail order book(13 more words not shown)
- BDuring the last(16 more words not shown)
- CFierce competition has(13 more words not shown)
- DDue to the(30 more words not shown)
- EThe National Booksellers(14 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
What would have happened without the campaign?
The bookstores' fiction revenue fell while people were being encouraged to read more fiction. That doesn't automatically mean the encouragement failed. Perhaps revenue would have fallen much faster without it. A campaign that kept a struggling market from collapsing could have helped even though it didn't reverse the decline.
Picture two possible paths. With the campaign, sales revenue slopes downward. Without it, perhaps the line drops all the way to zero. We know the first path actually happened; we haven't been shown the second. We can't measure the campaign's effect merely by noticing that the first line goes down.
What we’re looking for
We're asked to weaken the claim that the campaigns were largely unsuccessful. I'd look for evidence that things would have been worse without them. Maybe a similar country without a campaign experienced a much sharper decline. That would give us a reason to question the author's assessment.
Working the answers
- ACorrect
This exposes another problem: bookstore revenue isn't the same thing as how much fiction people read. Fiction sales through mail order book clubs grew substantially during the same period. People could be getting their books there instead of at the bookstore.
That's a different route from the prediction about an even worse decline without the campaign. It makes us reconsider the measure of success itself. Someone could also read a borrowed novel or get one from the library without adding a dollar to bookstore revenue. A gives us an actual growing source of fiction outside the channel the author measured. It doesn't prove that the campaigns caused the growth, but it weakens the attempt to declare them unsuccessful from bookstore results alone.
- B
The most profitable item isn't necessarily the item people read most. More importantly, newspapers and periodicals earning more profit than novels doesn't tell us whether the campaigns got people to read more fiction. A profit ranking doesn't establish success or failure at that goal.
- C
These price cuts concern biographies, not fiction. A lower price for novels could help explain lower fiction revenue even if people were buying just as many novels. But we can't move the markdowns from the books C names to the books the argument concerns.
- D
Libraries sound promising: people could read more fiction by borrowing it. But read what these patrons are seeking. Books about changing careers and starting businesses aren't evidence of increased fiction reading. The location matches a possible explanation; the kind of reading doesn't.
- E
Leaving out overseas mail-order profits doesn't tell us that those profits, or fiction reading, have grown. It also concerns overseas customers rather than the population targeted by a national campaign. Unlike A, E supplies neither the relevant growth nor a clear reason to think the measured domestic bookstore decline misrepresents the campaign's outcome.
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