PrepTest 157, Section 3, Question 20
Psychologist: In an experiment, business managers who normally(58 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(9 more words not shown)
- AThe business managers(24 more words not shown)
- BDrinking less coffee(19 more words not shown)
- CThere is no(21 more words not shown)
- DIn the experiment,(24 more words not shown)
- EThe amount of(17 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
What about the rest of the manager's job?
The extra coffee helped with processing new information quickly and hurt the ability to combine it with past information. We are told integration matters more than speed. That makes the loss worth taking seriously, but it doesn't automatically tell us the net effect on management ability.
Suppose extra coffee helps a manager get through a huge backlog of important emails. Maybe that improvement matters more than a modest decline in combining old and new information. That's a possibility to check, not a new result from the experiment. The point is that we have examined only part of the job. We don't know how much of the whole picture those two measured abilities represent.
What we’re looking for
For the necessary assumption, I'd initially look for an answer ruling out other parts of the job that could change the overall result. Let's test that prediction rather than assuming the two measured abilities tell us everything.
Working the answers
- A
The managers need not differ from one another for extra coffee to impair their ability. Imagine they all began with the same processing speed and integration ability and all changed in the same way. That wouldn't undermine the psychologist's proposed conclusion. Differences among participants are not the missing assumption.
- B
We studied more coffee than usual, not less. Drinking less might help, hurt, or make no difference, and the conclusion about drinking more could still hold. This comparison between two changes in consumption isn't required.
- C
This is tempting because it seems to rule out the other important parts of management we were wondering about. But it goes too far. Another skill could be more important than either measured ability while staying completely unaffected by extra coffee. In that case, its importance wouldn't offset the harm from the coffee.
Think again about answering emails. If that skill mattered enormously but extra coffee didn't improve it, pointing to it wouldn't rescue the managers from the measured loss. We don't need to assume no more important factor exists. We need to rule out an outweighing benefit from the particular change being studied.
- DCorrect
The extra coffee must not provide benefits that outweigh the reduction in integration ability. If it did—perhaps by dramatically improving another important part of the job—the managers could become better overall even though this one ability got worse. That would directly undermine the conclusion. D focuses on the balance of coffee's effects, which is what we need, rather than declaring that no other important abilities exist.
- E
Coffee doesn't have to be the most important influence on information-processing speed for drinking extra coffee to affect overall management ability. Sleep or some other factor could influence speed more. And speed is only one part of the larger judgment we are evaluating. E neither supplies nor identifies the required assumption about the net effect.
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