Logical Reasoning

PT154 · S1 · Q22 Newspaper: Increases in produce

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Newspaper: Increases in produce prices apparently have led to an increase in the planting of personal gardens.

Conclusion

Increases in produce prices have led to an increase in the planting of personal gardens.

Evidence

The two largest retail seed companies each reported sales increases of 19% last year, a year in which the price of produce spiked.

Evaluate

The "apparently" in the first sentence is the Opinion Indicator that shows it's our conclusion, plus the second idea is past tense and quantitative, making it seem factual.

This has the Curious Fact / Explanation structure we see so often in Strengthen / Weaken questions.

Curious Fact: Why did the two biggest retail seed companies report 19% increases in sales last year? Author's Story: Last year, the price of produce spiked, so people decided to start growing produce at home in personal gardens, so they bought a bunch of seeds from these two large companies.

The pressure points: - how ELSE could we explain the Curious Fact - how plausible is the Author's Story

Goal

Since this is Weaken, we would either want 1. a different reason why the two companies have +19% in sales (maybe they're selling something other than seeds / maybe some of their competitors went out of business so that now they have a bigger market share)

2. something that undermines the storyline that people reacted to high produce prices at the supermarket by thinking, .

22.

Which one of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the newspaper's argument?

Increases in produce prices are
Irrelevant
We don't care about the backstory of why produce prices went up. We are only interested in the backstory of why the seed companies' sales went up 19%, since our author's causal hypothesis is leaning on that.
5% picked this
The average personal garden is
Trap
No Impact Out of Scope: size of garden The idea that today's gardens are smaller than 20-30 years ago moves somewhat in the right direction: it kind of hints at undermining the plausibility that there has been a recent increase personal gardening. But the author didn't claim that people's gardens had gotten bigger; she claimed that there has been an increase in the planting of personal gardens. So she's saying there are more people who went from no garden to some garden. The fact that 20-30 years ago, the average garden size is irrelevant. We don't care about average size; we care about how many people now have gardens vs. a year or two ago.
15% picked this
Community gardens report that waiting
Strengthens
This increases the plausibility of the author's causal story that people are more interested in growing their own stuff (possibly as a result of escalating produce prices). Not only does longer waitlists for community garden plots corroborate a lot of demand for personal gardening, it also might mean that people are motivated to start their own garden since they feel like they'll never get off the waitlist for their community's garden.
6% picked this
Personal gardens are usually popular
Out of Scope: economic downturn
All we know is that produce prices spiked. We have no idea if we're in an economic downturn, so there's no way to relate this answer to the story we're analyzing.
10% picked this
Correct
A large retail seed company
Why this is right
This correct answer does what most correct Weaken answers do when dealing with Curious Fact / Explanation arguments: it provides a different way to explain the Curious Fact. Normally, on Weaken, my first pass through the answers is mainly with the mental mantra of "I need a different way to explain ____ ". If we read these answers saying, "I need a different reason why the two large seed companies have a +19% increase in sales", then this answer will resonate more. When Borders went out of business, Barnes & Noble's sales probably went up. When Circuit City went out of business, Best Buy's sales probably went up. If a large retail seed company goes out of business, then all its previous customers need to find a new place to buy their seed, so that drives new business toward the remaining seed companies.
Skill tested: Weaken · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
64% picked this

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