Logical Reasoning

PT102 · S4 · Q2 Twenty professional income-tax

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Twenty professional income-tax advisors were given identical records from which to prepare an income-tax return.

Information

background fact 20 pro tax prep pros were given identical records (which unknowingly to them were just made up records compiled by a financial magazine).

quantifiers (none, only one) None of them agreed with each other. Only one was technically correct.

Evaluate

On Must Be True and Most Supported (i.e. Inference questions), we're reading the facts and looking to see if we could combine 2 or more of them in order to derive some other truth.

Generally, that action involves using Conditional, Causal, or Quantitative ideas they've presented. There aren't conditional or causal ideas here, but all three sentences are quantified in some way, so we should think about trying to make some math-y inference.

20 of them were all given the same records and asked to prepare a tax return. None of them were the same.

What does combining those two ideas tell us?

They all had the same records but none of them prepared a tax return the same way? I guess there are a lot of judgment calls to make along the way. If it were more objective, we'd expect them to arrive at the same answer.

20 of them were all given the same records. Only one of them was technically correct.

What does combining those two ideas tell us?

Apparently 19 of them were technically incorrect! Why are we paying these professional tax prep folks our money if 95% of them couldn't get this right?

Goal

We're always at the mercy of the answers. Our goal is to pick the most provable claim we can find. But maybe we'll see an answer reinforcing the inferences we made, that preparing a tax return is not a completely objective process that any professional would do the same way, or that 19 out of 20 of these fools didn't correctly prepare the tax return.

2.

If the information above is correct, which one of the following conclusions can be properly drawn on the basis of it?

  1. Only one out of every

    Too Strong: any

    Even though in this one experiment with these twenty random pro tax preparers, only 1 out of 20 were correct, we can't definitively prove that this exact ratio will hold for every single professional tax advisor's work. This answer is making an insanely strong claim that applies to every single pro tax advisor in the world. Also, it's worth noting that this has switched from the contents of the paragraph (1 out of 20 preparers got the return correct) to some distorted version (1 out of 20 returns that a professional prepares will be correct).

    7% picked this

  2. Correct

    The fact that a tax

    Why this is right

    Just as we were scared by the crazy extreme strength of (A)'s wording (it would be really hard to prove that something is true about every single pro tax preparer in the world), we're really enticed to see the weak strength of the wording here. The burden of proof is very low when we say, "The fact that X is true provides no guarantee that Y is true". Consider the claim, "The fact that someone scores a 175 on their LSAT provides no guarantee that they'll get into UCLA." How much information would you need to prove that claim is true? Just one data point. Jill got a 175 and didn't get into UCLA. That proves that a 175 doesn't guarantee acceptance. So to prove this answer choice is a true claim, we just need at least one data point in which "a tax return has been prepared by a professional, but the tax return has not been correctly prepared". Do we have any such data points? Heck, yeah! We've got 19 of those sorry data points. This answer is rewarding one of the inferences we made (19 of them were technically incorrect). It's just finding a nauseatingly-LSAT way of presenting that idea.

    Skill tested: Must be True · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    89% picked this

  3. In order to insure that

    Too Strong: necessary Opposite, if anything

    This answer boldly says that anyone who isn't a professional will have incorrect tax returns 100% of the time. Wow. Couldn't a non-professional get a really easy tax return correct some of the time? It's really necessary to hire a professional? Beyond the over the top strength of this claim, we actually have 19 examples of professionals who prepared this tax return incorrectly, so this paragraph wasn't exactly a vote of confidence for professional tax prep people.

    1% picked this

  4. All professional income-tax advisors make

    Too Strong: all

    Even though this is surely a must be true in real life (who among us is perfect at our jobs), there is no support for this in the passage. We only heard about 20 tax advisors. We can't assume anything about all professional tax advisors on the basis of 20 of them.

    3% picked this

  5. People are more likely to

    Out of Scope

    Out of Scope: prepare their own Unsupported Comparison We don't have any information at all on what happens when people prepare their own tax returns, so there's no way we could prove this sort of comparison.

    1% picked this

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