PrepTest 131, Section 3, Question 5
Challenger: The mayor claims she has vindicated those(106 more words not shown)
As a response to the(9 more words not shown)
- Atakes for granted(19 more words not shown)
- Bdoes not consider(18 more words not shown)
- Cfails to address(31 more words not shown)
- Dignores the challenger's(22 more words not shown)
- Eexplicitly attributes to(11 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
The mayor promised more employment opportunities, and the number of jobs in the city went up by 8 percent. Has she delivered? Before hearing the objection, we might wonder what kind of jobs these were. An increase in poor jobs might not be much to celebrate. But the challenger raises a different, more specific problem.
The national government moved an office into the city and brought nearly its entire staff along. The additional jobs are held by those newcomers. So how did this increase give the people already living in the city more opportunities to find work? Counting jobs located in the city is different from counting openings available to its unemployed residents.
What might the mayor say? Perhaps she helped negotiate the office's move and could explain how it created opportunities for existing residents. Negotiating the move alone wouldn't settle the availability issue, but a response about actual local opportunities would at least address the objection.
What we’re looking for
Instead, she repeats the 8 percent figure and says it exceeds her predecessors' increases. The challenger wasn't disputing that number. The challenge was to what the number shows. For this flaw question, the central problem is that the mayor never answers that objection.
Working the answers
- A
Whether the mayor's supporters considered jobs important doesn't resolve the dispute. Even if every supporter cared deeply about employment, the mayor would still need to explain how jobs already held by newcomers increased opportunities for existing residents. A doesn't identify the failure in her response.
- B
The percentage of eligible voters who are unemployed isn't the missing comparison. An 8 percent increase in the number of jobs tells us neither that those jobs were available to unemployed residents nor how many such residents obtained them. Knowing the unemployed voters' percentage would not make the mayor responsive to the objection.
- CCorrect
The challenger distinguishes more jobs in the city from more available jobs for the people who lived there when the mayor was elected. The mayor replies with the same increase in total jobs and never explains how those residents benefited. Repeating an undisputed statistic doesn't answer an objection about what that statistic establishes.
- D
The challenger doesn't claim that the newcomers changed the size or priorities of the voting public. The newcomers matter because they already hold the added jobs. D invents an objection about the electorate instead of describing the employment objection the mayor leaves unanswered.
- E
The mayor says the challenger doesn't dispute the employment statistics, and that is consistent with what the challenger says. The challenger accepts the increase but challenges its significance. The mayor's failure is to ignore that distinction, not to attribute an unexpressed belief to the challenger.
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