Logical Reasoning

PT112 · S3 · Q2 Several companies will soon offer

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Several companies will soon offer personalized electronic news services, delivered via cable or telephone lines and displayed on a television.

Conclusion

Newspaper sales will decline drastically if these services (where people can subscribe to topics and get continuous updates on their TV) become widely available.

Evidence (since)

These services will provide people with the information they are looking for more quickly and efficiently than printed newspapers can.

Evaluate

Honestly, this is such an old preptest and thus such an outmoded technological premise to think about, that it's hard to put ourselves in a 1999 testwriter's brain and picture the head to head battle they're picturing between what newspapers offer and what these personalized news services would offer.

We know our job is to argue against this prediction. Since the conclusion is Conditional, we know we're supposed to play along with the trigger but dispute the outcome.

Goal

Let's look for an answer that helps us argue that .

It will probably either feel like, or like

2.

Which one of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the argument?

  1. Correct

    In reading newspapers, most people

    Why this is right

    This helps us argue that even if this new thing becomes popular, people will still want to buy newspapers. Why? Because they aren't buying newspapers just to find the topics they know they're interested in and get updated information on them. They also enjoy just casually browsing through the paper seeing if any pictures or headlines catch their interest. The new service is like going onto Amazon with a specific purchase in mind, and getting it asap in the most convenient way possible. The newspaper is like going to a shopping mall and just walking around, possibly ducking into stores you had no prior plan to visit, just following your whims where they take you (or a more modern example could be just scrolling your Twitter timeline, not knowing what sort of articles or threads you might come across that you decide to read, even though you didn't have a specific plan to learn about that when you logged on).

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

    81% picked this

  2. Companies offering personalized electronic news

    No Impact

    This is one of those wishy-washy answers we see on Strengthen / Weaken that feels like - differences exist - fluctuations happen This doesn't really tell us anything. We could weaken the argument if we knew that "companies offering this new service will charge so much for it that even though it's widely available, people aren't going to be taking advantage of it unless they're really wealthy", but this answer certainly isn't telling us that.

    10% picked this

  3. Approximately 30 percent of people

    No Impact

    The people who have never relied on newspapers didn't buy them before and won't buy them in the future, so they won't be any cause of newspaper sales declining if they were never buying newspapers to begin with. In that sense, hearing about these people seems very irrelevant. We might interpret this answer like, "maybe these 30% of people who rely on getting news through TV/radio are the ones that will be interested in this new service that shows continually updating news on your TV. And thus the other 70% of people who have sometimes relied on newspapers will stick with newspapers and sales won't decline." But that would be adding a pretty dubious assumption. In order for this answer to be a way to argue that newspaper sales won't decline, we'd have to be thinking that there won't be any big chunk of the 70% of people who have relied on newspapers that will be lured into leaving newspapers once this new TV news-crawl service is offered. This answer isn't giving us any justification for believing that.

    4% picked this

  4. The average monthly cost of

    Strengthens

    A possible objection we can make to the argument is, "what if the new service is so expensive that almost no one wants to buy it?" But this counters that objection by saying, "The new service is just as much as a newspaper, but the new service gets you news updates much faster than a newspaper can."

    4% picked this

  5. Most people who subscribe to

    Strengthens

    A possible objection we can make to the argument is, "what if the new service is so expensive to setup and install that almost no one will want to buy it?" But this counters that objection by saying, "Most people won't have to pay anything extra to set it up or install it".

    1% picked this

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