Logical Reasoning

PT114 · S4 · Q10 Technological progress makes economic growth

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Technological progress makes economic growth and widespread prosperity possible; it also makes a worker’s particular skills less crucial to production.

Background Claims

Causal (X makes Y possible) Technological progress makes economic growth and widespread prosperity possible, and makes a worker's specific skills less crucial to production.

Pivot (yet) / Causal Difference-Maker (depends) Workers' satisfaction in their work depends on believing that their work is difficult and requires uncommon skills.

Evaluate

When we see Pivot words in Inference paragraphs, we know we should try to Reconcile the Pivot idea with what came before it. Is there any Overlapping Concept that we see in both the first and second sentences?

Sure, they both talk about "a worker's skills".

Sentence 1 says that technological progress makes a worker's skills less crucial. Sentence 2 says that worker satisfaction depends on believing that their work requires uncommon skills.

If your skills become less crucial, then you won't feel like your job requires uncommon skills, and so your job satisfaction will go down.

Goal

Reconciling the first and the second sentences gives us a causal chain:

tech ⇢ makes skills ⇢ workers less ⇢ less progress less crucial believe rare satisfy skills req'd w/ job

Let's look for a safely worded answer saying that technological progress can lead to less worker satisfaction.

10.

Which one of the following most logically completes the argument?

decreases the quality of most
Out of Scope: most products / quality
The stimulus never talks about the quality of products changing, nor does it generalize about what would be true for "most" products.
0% picked this
provides benefits only to those
Too Strong: only
We can say that technological progress could have the effect of lessening the job satisfaction of some workers. But that doesn't mean that people whose work is directly affected by technological progress get no benefit from technological progress.
4% picked this
is generally opposed by the
Too Strong: generally opposed
Although we have reason to think that technological progress may lessen the job satisfaction of some workers (who come to think of their skills as being less uncommon and important), we can't say that technological progress is generally opposed by workers. We don't know if workers are aware that technological progress is having this effect on their job satisfaction; we don't know if it has that effect on most workers; we don't know if the workers consider technological progress, on balance, to be a net loss that they should oppose.
7% picked this
Correct
causes workers to feel less
Why this is right
This is the result we get from Reconciling the Pivot idea with the first sentence, which sets up a causal chain. Technological progress makes a worker's particular skills less crucial. And since job satisfaction depends on believing that your work requires uncommon skills, as your skills feel less crucial you'll have less job satisfaction.
Skill tested: Most Supported · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
89% picked this
eliminates many workers’ jobs
Out of Scope: eliminates many jobs
The passage never discusses any job loss.
1% picked this

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