Logical Reasoning

PT112 · S1 · Q12 The consumer price index is

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The consumer price index is a measure that detects monthly changes in the retail prices of goods and services.

Conclusion (Therefore)

The value of government benefits is sometimes greater than is warranted by the true change in costs.

Evidence

The value of some government benefits is based on the consumer price index (which measures the retail prices of goods and services.

The CPI does not consider technological innovations that may drastically reduce the cost of producing some goods.

Evaluate

Our author is essentially saying that the CPI is a bit of a flawed metric when it comes deciding on the size of a monthly retirement savings. After all, it's not considering the fact that sometime a factory has a technological innovation that drastically reduces how much it costs to produce a certain good.

We're supposed to be like,

Who cares if factories suddenly have their expenses lowered? The consumer price index is just measuring how much it costs Grandpa to buy batteries for his hearing aids. If the battery manufacturer finds some technological innovation that makes it way cheaper to for them to produce batteries, does that matter to Grandpa? If the manufacturer keeps the price of batteries the same, it will now make a bigger profit than before, since its production costs were drastically lowered. But that has nothing to do with the retail price of this battery. And if the manufacturer decides to lower the retail price, then the CPI will detect that. That's what it does. It detects monthly changes in retail prices.

Goal

Let's look for some answer that sounds like,

12.

The reasoning in the argument is most vulnerable to the criticism that the argument

  1. fails to consider the possibility

    Not an Objection

    Since this begins with fails to consider / ignores the possibility, we can ask ourselves if this idea would hurt the author. It doesn't seem like there's any way to weaken the author by saying, "Hey, buddy, in some years, there's no change in the CPI." He would be like, "Sure. I never said it changes every year. I just said that sometimes government benefits are higher than they should be, because sometimes production costs are drastically reduced."

    7% picked this

  2. fails to make explicit which

    Never a Flaw

    Our objection to this author wasn't, "Hey, author --- if you're going to suggest that the CPI sometimes provides the wrong number for government benefits, then you'll need to explicitly list all the goods and services included in the CPI." LSAT is never asking us to complain that we didn't receive a precise number/measurement or a precise definition or the specific names of people alluded to, and so forth. We're supposed to be objecting to bad logic moves, not missing facts.

    5% picked this

  3. presumes, without providing warrant, that

    Out of Scope: unusual goods

    The argument doesn't specify whether the CPI only tracks "usual" retail goods or all retail goods. Does the author need to assume that more than 50% of retirement benefits are used to purchase usual goods? Would it hurt his argument if only 51% was used to purchase unusual and only 49% was used to purchase usual. Of course not, because the distinction between usual and unusual goods means nothing to this conversation.

    5% picked this

  4. uncritically draws an inference from

    Bad Conclusion / Evidence Match

    This answer accuses the conclusion of being about what will be true in the future and the evidence of being what was true in the past. The conclusion isn't about the future. It's just saying "sometimes the value of benefits is greater than is warranted". And the evidence wasn't about any past circumstance. It was just a fact about one sort of thing the CPI doesn't track or consider.

    4% picked this

  5. Correct

    makes an irrelevant shift from

    Why this is right

    This speaks to the Irrelevant Rebuttal we were looking for. Why does the author care if the CPI tracks when a company's production costs change? The CPI is only supposed to be measuring retail prices that consumers pay. If a change in production costs affects the retail price, then the CPI will detect it. And if the change in production costs doesn't affect the retail price, then who cares about the production cost? That has nothing to do with the CPI's job, which is only to measure the price tag at the store.

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

    78% picked this

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