Wow!!

This question has me stumped big time I'm having really hard time seeing why the answer is (A).

I see the conclusion as "Money does not really exist."

The author goes on to say that "money would disappear if there was a universal loss of belief in it."

Can anyone help with this one, I think I spent an hour looking at it. The only reason I got this one right was because I eliminated the rest of the answers. But I really want to know why

Thank you

First, let me say that eliminating four wrong answers is a perfectly valid way to answer LR questions. On hard questions, that's exactly what you should do! That said, however, here's why the answer is (A).

You've correctly identified his conclusion ("money does not exist") but the next step is to identify the core of his argument. What evidence does he offer to support his claim? The core of his argument is this: "Money does not exist BECAUSE it would disappear if everyone stopped believing in it."

His argument does not obviously prove his conclusion, however. On the contrary, his argument contains a logical jump (also known as an assumption). Here is his logical jump:

ASSUMPTION: "If everyone stops believing in money, and money disappears as a result, then money does not exist."

Since the prompt asks us for the missing assumption, we are looking for an answer that says this. Answer choice (A) is the exact contrapositive of the assumption we're looking for:

CONTRAPOSITIVE: "if <something> does exist, then it wouldn't disappear even if everyone stopped believing in it."

Statements are logically equivalent to their contrapositives; thus (A) is the answer choice we're looking for.

Clear as mud?

Thank you soo much,

damn you contra-positives!! Damn you!!!

talk about being burned out by a question, I looked at my work and had it broken down to what you explained but couldn't put it all together