Logical Reasoning

PT140 · S3 · Q10 Company president: Whenever you

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Company president: Whenever you subcontract the manufacturing of a product, you lose some control over the quality of that product.

Statements

conditional (whenever = Left side, sufficient)

Subcontract the Lose some control manufacturing of → over quality of a product that product We subcontract some manufacturing (i.e. we lose some control over the quality of some of our products)

conditional (only = Right side, necessary)

We subcontract They have complete with a company → control over quality of their products

Evaluate

We see two conditional claims, signified by "whenever" and "only". Do they chain together? Is there any Overlapping Idea?

They're both talking about subcontracting, and they're both talking about control over the quality of products. Hmm. Sometimes we need to contrapose a conditional to see how it would fit.

If we contrapose the first sentence is saying,

not lose some control not subcontract over quality of product → manufacturing

Here, we hope that it clicks that "not losing some control over quality" is a match for "maintain complete control over quality". If you've maintained complete control, then you haven't lost any control, and thus you haven't subcontracted.

Goal

Since this company subcontracts, they are losing some control over the quality of their product. Since the companies they subcontract with maintain complete control over quality, those companies do not subcontract.

Maybe the answer will say ?

10.

Which one of the following can be properly inferred from the company president's statements?

Correct
When the president's company subcontracts
Why this is right
Since we were told that this company only subcontracts with companies who maintain total control, and since we were told that subcontracting causes you to lose some control, it makes sense that the companies this company subcontracts with aren't allowed to subcontract. To put this another way (and say subcontract five more times to melt our brain), let's say we our subcontracting with company X. We first verify, "you guys maintain complete control over quality right?" The president of X assures us, "Yes we have complete control". If X then decides to subcontract out part of the job they're doing for us, then X loses some control over the quality of the job they're doing for us. That's in violation of our initial agreement! X promised us that they maintained complete control, so we assumed they don't do any further subcontracting.
Skill tested: Must be True · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
67% picked this
Companies that subcontract the manufacturing
Out of Scope: disappointed
In order to prove this claim, we'd have to know that "often, when you lose some control over the quality of a product, you end up being disappointed in the quality of that product". We weren't told any such thing, so we can't prove this answer choice.
5% picked this
The company president insists on
Too Strong
Too Strong: insists on max control Contradicted, if anything This basically goes against what we were told. This president subcontracts out some manufacturing, which we know means that this president's company loses some control over the quality of that product. That's at odds with "insisting on as much control as possible".
22% picked this
When consumers know that a
Out of Scope: consumers / dubious
This is a Must Be True question, so we can't really comment on stuff we didn't talk about (unless we have a conditional rule that we can apply to novel situations). We didn't discuss consumers or their perceptions of quality at all, so there's no way to derive this answer from the facts presented.
2% picked this
When a company manufactures some
Out of Scope
Out of Scope: in-house vs. subcontract Too Strong: uniformly better The difference between in-house manufacturing and subcontracted manufacturing, from what we were told, is that the former involves more control over quality than the latter. In order to prove this claim, we'd have to know that "when you maintain more control over the quality of a product, it comes out with uniformly better quality than when you lose some control over the quality of a product". We weren't told any such thing, so we can't prove this answer choice.
5% picked this

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