Logical Reasoning

PT143 · S4 · Q7 Baxe Interiors, one of the largest interior design

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Baxe Interiors, one of the largest interior design companies in existence, currently has a near monopoly in the corporate market.

Statements

conditionals (only = right side)

When it comes to corporate managers Solicit design → believe unlikely proposal to go bankrupt

believe unlikely → very large to go bankrupt companies

facts

Boxe has a near monopoly in the corporate market.

Boxe has never won a prestigious award for its corporate work, whereas several small design companies have.

Evaluate

We're given two conditionals that chain together, so it's likely that the correct answer will reward our ability to connect those. Can we apply them to any of the facts we learned?

We know that if corporate managers are soliciting all this design work from Baxe (which we can tell from the fact that they have a near monopoly in the corporate market), then corporate managers apparently believe that Baxe is unlikely to go bankrupt, which means that Baxe is a very large company.

Since we also know that Baxe hasn't won any awards for their corporate work, we could infer some Trait Overlap type inference like, .

The fact that some small design companies have won awards for their corporate work is interesting, because if a company is small (not very large), then corporate managers aren't confident the company won't go bankrupt, and so they won't contract with such companies.

It's kind of confusing that small companies won't get contracts with corporate managers but are still wining awards for their corporate work.

Goal

Find the most provable claim. Be wary of language that's Too Strong, Unknown Comparisons, or Unmentioned ideas.

Perhaps the correct answer will be applying the conditional chain to either Baxe or to the small companies that have won awards.

7.

The statements above, if true, most strongly support which one of the following?

  1. There are other very large

    Unknown Comparison

    Unknown Comparison: inferior Out of Scope: other large companies Nothing in the paragraph speaks to quality of work. The fact that Baxe has a monopoly isn't strong support that they have the best quality. That's one possible reason a company might achieve a monopoly, but other ways exist too (best price / best value / best networking relationships). And, once we realize even the correct answer speaks about quality of work, this is still a tougher answer to support since it speaks about other very large design companies, which we know nothing about.

    1% picked this

  2. Baxe does not have a

    Out of Scope: other categories

    This is a classic trap answer pattern in which they try to get us to think that "the only thing mentioned = the only thing". We know they have a near monopoly in the corporate market for interior design. That's all we know. We have no idea what their market position is in any other category of interior design.

    2% picked this

  3. For the most part, designs

    Too Strong

    Too Strong: for the most part Unknown Comparison: superior Nothing in the paragraph speaks to quality of work. The fact that small companies have won awards and Baxe hasn't isn't strong support that small companies have superior designs. That's one possible reason a company might win awards, but there are others (people on the awards panel hate big companies and prefer giving awards to smaller boutique shops). But ultimately, when we find out that even the correct answer speaks about quality of work, we will reject this answer because it makes too big a generalization: "for the most part, small companies make better stuff" is way too broad, given that all we know is that several small companies "make better stuff" (i.e. have won an award).

    5% picked this

  4. At least some of the

    Unknown Comparison

    Unknown Comparison: better Out of Scope: aware Nothing in the paragraph speaks to quality of work. We can't support a judgment about better / inferior quality. The fact that small companies have won prestigious awards while Baxe has not won any is not grounds for assuming that the designs from the small companies are better. Also, we can't possibly support what corporate managers' awareness is, when it comes to quality of work. Just because they are mainly going with Baxe, rather than these small companies, doesn't necessarily mean that they're unaware of the quality of the small companies' designs. There could be lots of other reasons why they prefer to work with Baxe than with the smaller companies.

    4% picked this

  5. Correct

    The existence of interior designs

    Why this is right

    As it turns out, we can pick an answer that deals with superior / inferior design. We were correct to discount all the answers talking about better / superior / inferior designs, because winning vs. not-winning an award for your corporate work does not speak directly to quality. But ... this is a good reminder of how Most Supported forces us to work on a sliding scale. Since none of these answers are actually provable, we start thinking, "What's the best available answer?" This has very weak language -- "the existence of X does not currently threaten Y" has very limited scope. We're supporting this by combining two ideas: 1. some small companies have won awards and Baxe has not, so there exists some interior designs that are (deemed by an awards panel) superior to Baxe's. 2. corporate managers will only contract with large companies (this is given to us by combining the two conditionals in the final sentence). This answer ends up having a Reconcile the Pivot feel. We had learned that small companies, but never Baxe, have won awards for their corporate work. Nonetheless, corporate managers will only contract with very large companies. Combining those two ideas feels like, "even though there exist some small companies that are better at designing, the fact that corporate managers will only contract with very large companies means that Baxe's monopoly is probably safe for now".

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

    89% picked this

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