Logical Reasoning

PT146 · S3 · Q18 For consumers, the most enjoyable

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For consumers, the most enjoyable emotional experience garnered from shopping is feeling lucky.

Conclusion (too often)

Too often, retailers use advertised price cuts to promote their wares.

Evidence

(Even though consumers love feeling lucky, and promotions of this sort might make them feel lucky,) these promotions cut into profit margins and undermine customer loyalty.

Evaluate

When we do Main Conclusion we prime our brain to listen for an early Conclusion, since in the vast majority of these, the last idea is Support.

The two most common places to find the Conclusion on a Main Conclusion question would be - First Sentence - after a Pivot (like but, yet, however)

That helps us pick up on the Opinion indicator "too often" right after the pivot "but", in the second sentence.

Is this idea supported? Why does the author think retailers too frequently resort to advertised price cuts? Because, these advertised price cuts cut into profit margins and undermine customer loyalty.

Goal

We're just looking for an answer that replicates the meaning of .

Since that claim has a Pronoun, we should definitely replace the pronoun and think, .

We could consider alternate phrasings of the same meaning.

What's another way, for example, to say "Eddie, too often you start snacking before dinnertime"?

You could say, "Eddie, you should snack less before dinnertime" and that would mean the same thing.

18.

Which one of the following most accurately describes the overall conclusion drawn in the argument?

  1. Feeling lucky is the most

    Background

    If we correctly identified the conclusion up front, then we can just say, "Nope. This is the first claim. I want the third claim starting after the but." If we didn't, we can check whether this answer - seems like an opinion the author expressed - is supported by at least one explicit idea Why is feeling lucky the most enjoyable experience? (no answer provided)

    3% picked this

  2. Retailers take advantage of the

    Background

    If we correctly identified the conclusion up front, then we can just say, "Nope. This is the second claim. I want the third claim starting after the but." If we didn't, we can check whether this answer - seems like an opinion the author expressed - is supported by at least one explicit idea To me, it reads as a fact, not an opinion. There also isn't any support offered for it, unless you considered the third claim as providing evidence that they're taking advantage of consumers' desire for luck by advertising price cuts. But this would completely leave out the final two claims of the argument, in the last sentence.

    5% picked this

  3. Correct

    Advertised price cuts are overused

    Why this is right

    This is the best meaning-match available for "too often [retailers] resort to using advertised price cuts to promote their wares". Yes, "promoting wares" isn't identical to "gaining retail sales", but we all know the point of promoting your product is to gain more sales, so that's forgivable. "Overused" is a friendly synonym for "too often they resort to".

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

    48% picked this

  4. Using advertised price cuts to

    Premise Last Idea Trap

    The last claim certainly can be the Main Conclusion on a Main Conclusion question, but it's very uncommon, so you just want to have a healthy amount of skepticism about picking an answer that sounds like the final claim. This answer is our premise. We can tell it's not a conclusion because it has no support. why should we believe that "using advertised price cuts to promote retail products reduces profit margins and undermines customer loyalty"? [no answer] Sometimes it helps me to think about what supporting ideas would have sounded like, in order to convince myself that we did not get any supporting ideas. Using advertised price cuts reduces profit margins because customers end up paying less for your product, so you get less revenue for the same unit cost of the item. The author didn't support this idea. She thought it was self-justifying.

    34% picked this

  5. Making consumers feel lucky is

    Too Broad

    This is too broad an idea to match "too often retailers use advertised price cuts as a way to promote their wares".

    10% picked this

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