Logical Reasoning

PT143 · S3 · Q24 Columnist: On average, about 70 percent

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Columnist: On average, about 70 percent of the profit from tourism in developing countries goes to foreign owners of tourist businesses.

Statements

Math-y

70% of tourism profit in developing countries goes to foreign owners of tourist businesses.

The more establish a country becomes as a tourist destination, the higher a proportion of tourism bucks get exported to the foreign owners.

Causal (counteract this effect) Pivot (However)

Tourists can counteract this effect by obtaining accommodations and other services directly from local people.

Evaluate

When an Inference stimulus Ends with a Pivot, it's usually a strong clue that the correct answer will be some same synthesis of the Pivot idea with some idea(s) that came before it.

It would be tempting here to slide into should territory here with our prediction. When we hear about foreign owners getting increasing richer off developing countries, it rankles our woke consumerism instinct and makes us think,

But Inference is asking what we can derive and there's no should on the page.

Goal

Look for something safely worded reflects the synthesis of .

24.

Which one of the following is most strongly supported by the statements made by the columnist?

Tourists in a developing nation
Too Strong: should / conditional
Well, well, well ... here it was waiting for us at the palace gates, the trap answer we were afraid of, where they try to tempt us into taking a leap away from facts and into opinion. It's almost always wrong to go from facts to "should". It's not never wrong, because after all this is Most Supported, so sometimes the correct answer is a decent distance from what was literally said. But we would only pick such an answer if we thought it was the most provable / most supportable. Here, we have a correct answer that can basically be derived from the passage, so it beats out this answer that goes from a few facts into a rigid / normative conditional rule. It turns out that this Pivot Ending is really just setting up the best trap answer, not setting up the real answer.
11% picked this
Correct
In at least some of
Why this is right
This has very soft, provable language: in at least some. We can derive this from combining the first two sentences. We know that the average rate at which profits flow to foreign owners is 70%. If you're in a developing country where 70% of the profits flow to foreign owners, then most of the profits from tourism go to foreign owners. The 2nd sentence tells us that the "most established" tourism destinations are at the higher end of this average. So in general, in these most established destinations, at least 70% of the profit goes to foreign owners. As an analogy, suppose we said "people at company X make an average salary of $60,000 per year. In general, people in marketing tend to make more than other people at company X". Could we infer that at least one marketing person at X makes $60k or higher? Of course! If the average salary is $60k and the marketing people tend to have higher salaries than the non-marketing people, then it would be impossible for all marketing people to make less than $60k.
Skill tested: Most Supported · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
71% picked this
In at least some developing
Too Strong: most
The only fact we have about tourists is that they can choose to spend their money at locally owned businesses. We have no evidence whatsoever that this ever happens. We certainly don't have evidence that most of tourists' accommodations and services are currently coming through locally owned businesses.
3% picked this
In general, as a developing
Out of Scope: poorer locals
The passage doesn't give us any ammunition for deriving that local people become poorer as a country becomes a more established tourist destination. We know that local people in the tourism industry receive a smaller share of total tourism profits, but that's far from this answer for two reasons: 1. even if locals in the tourism industry receive a lower percentage of total tourism money, that doesn't mean they receive less money. Getting 15% of $1 billion is better than getting 20% of $500 million. 2. this would only speak to tourism money, not the economy overall for locals. It could be that even if locals in established tourist destination countries do worse in tourism, they do better overall.
4% picked this
Tourists who obtain accommodations and
Too Strong: in any way
There's no way we could derive this incredibly extreme claim that a tourist who obtains accommodations / services from local people doesn't contribute in any way to the profits of foreign owners of tourist businesses. Maybe a tourist chooses to stay at a locally-owned hotel, but that hotel still buys its towels or gets them laundered from a towel business that is owned by a foreign owner of tourist businesses. The tourist pays the local hotel money, and the hotel ends up passing on some of that money to the towel laundry service owned by the foreign investor, which helps to add profits to the foreign owner. By staying at a locally-owned hotel, the tourist is putting most of their hotel expenditures into the pockets of local owners (and thus counteracting the effect of most profits flowing to foreign owners), but there could still be some way in which the tourist's money indirectly makes it way into contributing to a foreign owner's profits.
11% picked this

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