PrepTest 159, Section 1, Question 19
Company spokesperson: Although our products are the most(41 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the company(8 more words not shown)
- Acontains a premise(7 more words not shown)
- Bfails to make(17 more words not shown)
- Ctreats a cause(16 more words not shown)
- Dpresumes that because(19 more words not shown)
- Ebases a conclusion(8 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Show me something about the quality. A high price tag alone doesn't tell me these are the best products.
The spokesperson invites us to consider a cheaper competitor. At first I might wonder whether we should also compare more expensive competitors, but the passage already says this company's products are the most expensive. The real question is how their quality compares with the alternatives.
The offered answer is that anything equally good or better would have to cost at least as much. But that already rules out a cheaper product being equally good or better. With the company's products priced at the top, the premise has built the disputed quality ranking into the rule about prices.
What we’re looking for
So we're going in a circle. The company hasn't supplied an independent reason to believe its products are superior; it asks us to accept a price-quality rule that already assumes the cheaper alternatives aren't as good. That's the flaw I want the answer to describe.
Working the answers
- ACorrect
The premise presupposes the conclusion by ruling out an equally good or better competitor at a lower price. That is just what the company needs to establish to defend its claim of superior quality over the cheaper alternatives. Restating that assumption as a rule about what good products would cost doesn't provide independent support for it.
- B
The argument concerns the best products available, not the best product anyone could theoretically create. We don't need to design a perfect future product to question whether a cheaper product already on the market could be just as good.
- C
The flaw isn't a switch between what causes a price and what a price causes. The spokesperson uses the proposed relationship between price and quality as evidence of superiority. We can identify the circular support without claiming that the argument says raising a price physically improves the product.
- D
There is no move from a feature of individual products to a feature of the company as a whole. The conclusion stays with the products: they are supposedly the best available. An argument that called the company itself the best because its products were best would be a different pattern.
- E
Circular claims can be perfectly consistent with one another. The problem here is that the support already assumes what the spokesperson wants us to believe, not that one premise contradicts another. No conflicting claims are needed for this flaw.
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