Logical Reasoning

PT149 · S3 · Q11 Gabriella: By raising interest rates

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Gabriella: By raising interest rates, the government has induced people to borrow less money and therefore to spend less, thereby slowing the country’s economy.

Gabriella's Claims

1. The government has raised interest rates 2. Doing so caused people to borrow less money. 3. Borrowing less money caused less spending. 4. Less spending slowed down the economy

Ivan's Responses

1. Implicitly agrees ("the government's action") 2. No comment. Ivan thinks that the government's action did not cause the slowdown, but he doesn't say anything to let us know which part of this causal chain he thinks is off. 3. No comment (same as #2) 4. Ivan implicitly agrees that the economy has slowed down, but thinks that a global slowdown is what caused this country's slowdown.

Evaluate

Ivan doesn't seem to object to any specific claim Gabriella makes. As he says, he disagrees with her overall analysis.

He doesn't think the government's move to raise interest rates is the principal cause of the economic slowdown. She implicitly does, because she lays out a causal chain that starts with the government's raising of interest rates and ends with the economic slowdown.

Goal

The answer will probably sound like whether the government's action to raise interest rates should be blamed for the recent economic slowdown (vs. whether it was caused by a global slowdown).

11.

Gabriella and Ivan disagree about whether

  1. the economic slowdown in the

    Unsupported Agree Position

    We can't derive support for affirming this answer from either speaker. Speaker 1 thought spending less caused the economic slowdown (this answer says the reverse). Speaker 2 thought the global slowdown caused this country's economic slowdown.

    1% picked this

  2. the economy of the country

    Unsupported Disagree Position

    Person 2 clearly agrees with this answer, but we have no support that Person 1 disagrees. The Disagree position is pretty harsh: this country's economy is not tied to the economies of any other countries. Person 1 doesn't think international economic interdependence is what caused this recent slowdown, but she still might agree that international economic interdependence exists for this country.

    3% picked this

  3. raising interest rates caused a

    Unsupported Disagree Position

    Person 1 would plausibly agree with this (although this says significant decrease, which goes a little farther than Person 1 went), but we can't support that Person 2 thinks that "raising interest rates did not cause a significant decrease in borrowing". We know that Person 2 thinks "raising interest rates did not cause the economy's slowdown", but we can't get more specific than that.

    1% picked this

  4. Correct

    raising interest rates caused the

    Why this is right

    Gabriella implicitly agrees with this, because she lays out a causal chain that starts from the the government's action to raise rates and ends with the economic slowdown. By raising rates, the govt. induced less borrowing and therefore less spending, thereby slowing the economy. Ivan implicitly disagrees with this because he says "the government's action (of raising interest rates) did not cause the economy's slowdown."

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

    95% picked this

  5. the global economy has slowed

    Unsupported Disagree Position

    We know Ivan agrees with this, but we have no support from Gabriella's claims that she believes "the global economy has not slowed".

    0% picked this

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