PrepTest 142, Section 2, Question 25
A recent poll revealed that most students at(61 more words not shown)
Which one of the following,(14 more words not shown)
- ABecause several of(24 more words not shown)
- BMost of the(11 more words not shown)
- CStudents taking the(15 more words not shown)
- DMost of the(24 more words not shown)
- EOften a person(18 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Wanting experience doesn't necessarily mean choosing experience over everything else.
Maybe students prefer a former university president in general, but an unusually appealing candidate changes their minds. Imagine a widely admired public figure who has never held that particular job. Students might want that person anyway. Or the cost of hiring an experienced candidate could create a tradeoff they hadn't considered. Those are possible ways a general preference and a particular choice could differ.
What we’re looking for
The question asks us to explain why these students favor an inexperienced candidate in the same poll where they favor experience. I'd first look for something explaining an exception to their stated preference. But we need evidence about their choices, not just our own opinion about who could do the job well.
Working the answers
- A
Several experienced candidates being hard to distinguish would explain why experience alone doesn't choose among those candidates. It wouldn't explain why the winner is someone without that experience. We need to account for the non-president's first-place position, not a tie among former presidents.
- B
This tells us there were plenty of experienced candidates on the list. It doesn't explain why the students preferred one of the others. If the list had contained no experienced candidates, their choice would be easy to understand; B gives us a very different situation.
- C
A shorter list doesn't tell us which qualifications were missing from it. Five choices rather than ten could still include several experienced presidents. Without more information about the listed and omitted candidates, C doesn't connect the poll's limits to the students' unexpected preference.
- DCorrect
The students don't know which candidates meet their preferred criterion. That is a different explanation from knowingly making an exception. Someone can genuinely want an experienced president but be unable to use that preference when choosing from unfamiliar names.
The favored candidate's actual lack of experience therefore needn't mean the students knowingly rejected experience. They might simply lack the information needed to make their specific choice reflect their general preference.
- E
A person could be well suited to the job without much experience. But that fact alone doesn't tell us what the students know or why they chose this person. To explain their preferences through qualifications, we'd need a connection to their assessment of the particular candidates. D directly explains why the criterion and the selection can come apart.
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