Logical Reasoning

PT18 · S4 · Q7 Advertisement: Over 80 percent of the people

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Advertisement: Over 80 percent of the people who test-drive a Zenith car end up buying one.

Implication

The quality of a Zenith is unusually impressive

Potential Support

Over 80% of the people who test-drive a Zenith end up buying one.

Evaluate

This is a weird question stem, in which the Conclusion they want us to evaluate is in the question stem, not in the paragraph.

Since this 'implication' would be interpreting the meaning behind the 80% statistic, we can use our Curious Fact / Explanation mindset.

Curious Fact Why it is that over 80% of people who test drive a Zenith end up buying one?

Potential Explanation / Implication It's because the test driver is unusually impressed by the Zenith and so wants to buy one on the spot!

When we're doing Weaken on a Curious Fact / Explanation type argument, our #1 concern is thinking of alternate explanations: why else could it be that 80% of test drivers end up buying one?

Maybe they're buying the car because it's the cheapest one on the lot, and thus the only one they can afford, and the test drive is just to confirm that the Zenith doesn't suck.

That wouldn't be a, . It would be more like a, .

Goal

Look for an Alternate Explanation for why over 80% of the people who test drive it buy it, or look for something that hurts the plausibility that the reason why such a high percentage of test-drivers buy it is because they find the test-drive experience unusually impressive.

7.

If the advertisement is interpreted as implying that the quality of the car is unusually impressive, which one of the following, if true, most clearly casts doubt on that implication?

  1. Test-drives of Zenith cars are,

    Out of Scope: around the block

    This answer is dwelling on the extraneous salesman language of "if you so much as drive this around the block ...". We're not being asked about the advertisers conclusion. We're being asked about whether we could infer that the Zenith has unusually impressive quality. If over 80% of people are taking Zenith's on a lengthy test drive in varied driving conditions, then they are getting more chances to be impressed with Zenith's quality, and so if anything this might strengthen the Implication.

    3% picked this

  2. Usually dealers have enough Zenith

    No Impact

    It wouldn't really matter whether people are usually test-driving the exact model they want to a roughly similar model.

    2% picked this

  3. Correct

    Those who take test-drives in

    Why this is right

    This sounds like our prediction -- an alternate explanation of the over 80% stat is that the test driver had already decided on this car, and the test drive was a formality to make sure the car ran okay. It's a spin on a classic form of Alternate Explanation - Reverse Causality It's not that the test drive caused them to want to buy the car, wanting to buy the car is what caused them to test drive it.

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

    79% picked this

  4. Almost 90 percent of the

    Out of Scope: same/different day

    Nothing in the paragraph describes or cares about when the test driver buys the car. We just know that over 80% of those who test drive end up buying one (could be same day, could be weeks later).

    7% picked this

  5. In some Zenith cars, a

    Too Weak

    This answer would potentially hurt the plausibility of the claim that Zenith's are unusually high quality, but it's too weak. In "some" (at least one) Zeniths, a minor part breaks and the dealers replace it with an improved part at no cost. No one expects cars to be perfect, so the fact that some cars had a minor glitch that was fixed for free does not seem like an indictment of the quality of the car.

    8% picked this

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