Only a very small percentage of

Answer choices

1. A

   Wrong Flaw9% picked this

   Six hundred is too small a sample on which to base so sweeping a conclusion about the representation of

   This answer is trying to sell us on a Sampling Flaw (in which the sample is too small, biased, or unrepresentative). However, 600 is a fairly robust data sample, and since the author is talking about representation on the most important corporate boards, the Top 600 corporate boards definitely feels like an adequate sense of coverage. If the author had said, "Look, there are no service people on the Top 5 corporate boards", then we could complain about sample size.

   9%
2. B

   Correct74% picked this

   The percentage of people from the service professions who serve on the boards of the 600 largest North American corporations reveals little about the

   Why this is right

   Some people probably caught this error on their initial read. I did not, but that's no obstacle to getting it right. We just have to consider what it's saying and ask ourselves, "Is this true? Does it describe a logic problem?" The author's first sentence is saying "Only a small % of people who work in service industry are in top corporate boardrooms." Well, naturally! Walmart may employ 1 million people, but only about 10-20 of them might sit on the corporate board. If we said, "Women are 53% of the population, but only 0.02% of female Walmart employees sit on the corporate board of Walmart. Thus, Walmart seems to be discriminating against women", that would be a crazy argument. We would need to say something more like, "53% of Walmart's employees are women, but only 20% of the board members are women." In this argument, we need to know what % of the population is service people, and what % of the board members are service people, in order to judge underrepresentation. But the author is giving us "what % of service people are on the board". 2% of US Senators are from Hawaii. 0.000001% of Hawaiians are US Senators. The statistic is drastically different if you present it backwards.

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

   74%
3. C

   Wrong Flaw14% picked this

   It is a mistake to take the 600 largest North American corporations to be typical

   This is again accusing the author of a Sampling problem, saying that she's using the top 600 boardrooms to make a generalization about all boardrooms (inviting the objection that "the top boardrooms aren't representative of boardrooms more broadly"). But is the author's conclusion about corporate boardrooms generally? No, it's about the most impotant (i.e. the top 600) ones, so the author is never relying on the assumption that they're typical. She's only speaking to what's going on inside those top 600.

   14%
4. D

   Out of Scope: would agree2% picked this

   It is irrelevant to smaller corporations whether the largest corporations in North America would agree to have significant numbers of workers from the service

   No part of this argument is concerned with or affected by how willing anyone would be to change reality. The conclusion is just attempting to describe reality. We're only assessing if we've been convinced that service people are underrepresented. This trap answer is Going to the Next Thought, and talking about what if anything we could / should do about it.

   2%
5. E

   Out of Scope: socially responsible1% picked this

   The presence of people from the service professions on a corporate board does not necessarily imply that that corporation will be more socially responsible

   That concept of "social responsibility" really comes out of left field. Nothing in the author's argument is dealing with that.

   1%