In a business whose owners

Answer choices

1. A

   No Impact1% picked this

   ignores the fact that businesses that achieve high levels of customer satisfaction are often profitable even if

   This is guilty of a Relative vs. Absolute blind spot. It doesn't matter whether businesses that pay their employees high wages are profitable; it only matters if they're more profitable / as profitable / less profitable, compared to family businesses. The advantage we heard was that family businesses, by paying less for labor, would have higher profits. The author was never denying that non-family businesses are also often profitable.

   1%
2. B

   Too Strong: lowest / lowest / highest27% picked this

   presumes, without providing justification, that businesses that pay the lowest wages have the lowest general operating expenses and

   The author hasn't committed herself to such an extreme assumption. She seems to just be pointing out an obvious truism, that if you can pay less for something a similar business would also have to pay for, then your operating expenses will be lower and thus your profits would be higher, all other things being equal. But this answer is saying that the author assumes that the businesses that pay the actual lowest wages have the lowest expenses and the highest profits. That is way too extreme and specific an idea to pin on the author. If the business that paid the lowest wages only had the 2nd lowest general operating expenses, that wouldn't hurt the author's argument, no negating this assumption is not an objection.

   27%
3. C

   Correct61% picked this

   ignores the fact that in a family business, paying family members low wages may itself

   Why this is right

   This points to the Internal Contradiction, a famous flaw that almost never occurs in the actual argument. In these arguments, the author says something early on in her paragraph that undermines something she says later on. The author has failed to explain why the family members will be more prosperous than if they were in a non-family business. Yes, the business will be more profitable than similar non-family businesses, but that's because the family members were paid exceptionally low wages. There could definitely be reasons why a family owned business was good for the family's prosperity, but the only advantage the author mentioned was self-defeating, since its mechanism of achieving prosperity for the family (higher profits) was done by giving less money to the family in the form of wages.

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

   61%
4. D

   Out of Scope: because they believe6% picked this

   presumes, without providing justification, that family members are willing to work for low wages in a family business because they believe that

   The author doesn't need to assume that family members are willing to work for pennies because they believe it will help their family. If we negated this and said, "That's not why they're willing to work for low wages. It's because of reason X." That wouldn't change anything. To the author, however it is they're willing, the fact that they're willing means lower operating expenses, which means "surest road to prosperity".

   6%
5. E

   Too Strong: only5% picked this

   presumes, without providing justification, that only businesses with low general operating

   The author never makes an absolute assumption that "if you don't have low operating expenses, you can never succeed". She makes a relative argument that "if you can have lower operating expenses, you can have higher profits."

   5%