Logical Reasoning

PT157 · S2 · Q15 The introduction of mass production

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The introduction of mass production techniques in modern industrial economies allowed the owners of industries to lower prices because they could employ fewer workers, many of whom required little training.

Facts

causal (allowed for / because / allowed) The introduction of mass production techniques in modern industrial economies allowed for lower prices because industries could employ fewer workers, many of whom required little training.

The lower prices allowed workers to buy goods that they previously would not have been able to afford.

pivot (but) But jobs for workers with little training are more vulnerable to elimination than those for more highly trained workers.

Evaluate

The sentence holding the blank has this form: But since [claim], _____ .

The Since-claim has to be a premise, and the other half of the sentence (our blank) has to be a Conclusion.

When we're picking the most logical Conclusion, it's essentially a Most Supported question. We want to synthesize the claims we were given into some safely worded takeaway.

On Most Supported / Must Be True, we read the stimulus looking for Causal / Conditional / Pivot / Math-y / Comparative wording, as a clue for what they want us to think about.

When the final sentence starts with a Pivot, as this one did, they want us to address the tension between this final idea and the information that came before it.

The tension here is that mass production techniques did something cool (allowed workers to buy goods that they previously couldn't afford), but also did something uncool (made low-skilled jobs more vulnerable to being eliminated).

Goal

Let's look for a safely worded answer addressing the "mixed bag" of mass production techniques? They do some good, they do some bad?

The final Pivot fact also introduces a distinction low-trained workers and highly trained ones, so the takeaway might address that disparity.

15.

Which one of the following most logically completes the argument?

highly trained workers have more
Unsupported Comparison
The stimulus never compares the purchasing power of highly trained workers to that of less-trained workers. The evidence says lower prices allowed workers in general to buy previously unaffordable goods; it doesn't distinguish between how much different training levels benefit from these lower prices. We'd have to make our own assumptions about how much money each group has, in order to take this leap.
10% picked this
the introduction of mass production
Contradicted
Too Strong (decreased benefits) Out of Scope (profits) This makes it sound like the new techniques were harmful overall to workers, but we can't say something that harsh. It says the new techniques led to lower prices, which allowed workers to buy goods they previously could not afford, which is an increase in benefits. The increased job insecurity is a decrease in benefits, but we have no way to weigh these against each other to conclude a net gain or loss. Also, we have no information on profit. We know that owners' expenses went down (they employ fewer workers) but also that their revenue went down (they lowered their prices), so we can't be sure whether that was a net gain or loss for profits.
6% picked this
even the highest paid employees
Contradicted
We heard that less trained workers are more likely to have their jobs eliminated than higher trained workers, but that's it. We can't justify the extreme claim that NO ONE is ever able to achieve job security.
2% picked this
Correct
a source of increased purchasing
Why this is right
This gets at the Pivot tension: mass production techniques did something cool (increased purchasing power) but also did something uncool (allowed owners to hire less trained workers, whose jobs are more vulnerable to elimination). (I'll be honest, this answer is phrased too strongly for my liking. We know that a source of increased purchasing power can also undermine job security, because we have this one example. But (D) sounds more like a generalization about all sources of increased purchasing power, which is too strong. Ultimately, it's our best available answer and feels like the form of a correct answer because it's addressing the Pivot tension. But it would be a weird conclusion for this paragraph. It sounds more like a correct answer on a Most Supported where the answers are labeled as Proposition / Generalization.)
Skill tested: Most Supported · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
77% picked this
the percentage of workers who
Out of Scope
We know that modern techniques made goods more affordable (increased the percentage of workers who can afford to purchase such goods). There's a risk of unemployment rising, but we don't know if it has, so there's no way to say that "even though goods are more affordable than before, the % who can afford is shrinking because there are fewer people getting a paycheck."
5% picked this

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