PT147 · S1 · Q25 Some advertisers offer certain

This is saying, "If a consumer isn't going to use a promotional computer to browse the internet, then no advertiser ever could offer a promotion that gives away such computers for free". This is crazy strong. Couldn't Pizza Hut have a promotion that says, "Order a large pizza for delivery, and you might find a code inside your pizza box redeemable for a free computer!" If such a promotion leads to more people ordering large pizzas, then Pizza Hut doesn't care what the contest winner does with the free computer. They can browse the internet, throw it off a roof, or just work on offline document creation all day. It's definitely possible for a company to have a promotion that involves a free computer, even if that computer is never used to browse the internet.

This is tempting, but all we know from the stimulus is that people spend more than they would have otherwise by using one of these advertising computers. We don't know that prior to using the computer they spent little, if any money on products from these advertisers. Perhaps I spend a good bit of money on Nordstrom Rack, on the regular. Then they offer me a free computer, which floods my screen with targeted ads of irresistible brand names at department store prices. It's worth it to Nordstrom Rack to give me this computer because it causes me to go from spending $100 / month at the Rack to spending $150 / month. In order for these computers to pay for themselves, they just have to increase sales enough from what the baseline spending otherwise would have been that the extra money pays for the computer. It doesn't need to be true that the people using these computers previously spent almost no money on the brands doing the advertising.

In a Most Supported context, if an LR stimulus or RC passage tells us that "Because of X, Y happened", then it's pretty fair to say, "If X hadn't happened, Y wouldn't have happened". We'd rather hear such a Flip the Causal Difference-Maker answer as soft as we can, like "If X hadn't happened, Y may not / probably would not have happened". So this answer is phrased more strongly than we'd like, because it's saying, "Without the continuous ads playing on the screen, they could not offer these computers free of charge". First of all, the advertisers could potentially offer the computers even at a loss. No one said that, "if the advertisers can't make money on this deal, then they can't do it". Secondly, who said the ads need to be continuous to work? What if ads only appeared 85% of the time you were using the computer? Couldn't those ads still be enough to increase sales. But most importantly is the fact that the computer has to advertising functions: 1. play ads constantly 2. learn user's browser patterns so that advertisers can send more targeted ads The final sentence tells us that #2, not #1, is responsible for the increased sales of the users. Targeted ads, not continuous ads, are identified as the causal difference-maker that leads to increased sales. A better answer would say, "The advertisers would find it harder afford to offer these computers free of charge if the computers did not collect browsing patterns that could be turned into precisely targeted ads."

This is lovably soft, because it's only saying sometimes, which just requires one data point. Do we have any way to support that, "in at least one case, a consumer using this type of computer can choose to abstain from having their browsing info sent off"? No, there's no text in here suggesting that users have any option to opt-out of the data collection.