PrepTest 156, Section 4, Question 15
Historian: Scholars writing histories of an era's business(43 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(8 more words not shown)
- AThe specific factors(16 more words not shown)
- BThose who study(14 more words not shown)
- CThe many public(24 more words not shown)
- DThe records of(15 more words not shown)
- EScholars who study(14 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
If we mostly study the winners, what happens to the failures?
A history of business should include firms that struggled or disappeared, as well as firms that succeeded. Looking more often at successful firms could give us an overly rosy picture of the past. The businesses that failed were part of that history too.
I can see why the historian's conclusion is plausible. My reservation is that scholars might recognize the imbalance and correct for it. Studying more successful firms wouldn't necessarily lead them to exaggerate success if they carefully accounted for the failures they're missing.
What we’re looking for
To strengthen the argument, I'd look for evidence that unsuccessful firms are neglected or that historians can't adequately correct the imbalance. What makes the material they actually study more likely to favor the successes?
Working the answers
- A
This concerns why businesses failed, not whether failed businesses are represented in the histories. Historians could know that many firms failed while being unable to identify the precise causes. Difficulty explaining failure doesn't by itself establish that they overestimate how much success there was.
- B
Present-day cultural assumptions might distort a historian's understanding, but that is a different possible bias. Which direction would those assumptions push the account? B doesn't tell us that they would cause historians to overstate business success or pay too little attention to failed firms.
- C
More objective records would be useful, but whose records are we reading? Even an accurate set of legal documents could give an unbalanced picture if it came mainly from successful companies. C compares two kinds of records without showing whether the selection of businesses favors winners over failures.
- DCorrect
Failed businesses are more likely to lose their records. That gives us a reason historians' available evidence will favor firms that survived: the failures are harder to study, even if a historian wants to include them.
The imbalance may therefore come from more than a preference for success stories. Some of the material needed to tell the other stories is gone. That supports the concern that the resulting histories make past business look more successful than it was, though it doesn't prove that every historian makes that mistake.
- E
Training in effective business administration doesn't tell us which historical businesses the scholars will study. A person could understand how to manage a business and still draw on records heavily weighted toward successful firms. The training doesn't establish or resolve the particular sampling problem at issue.
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