PT 54, Section 2, LR, #3 How am I missing this? Forum

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secretad

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PT 54, Section 2, LR, #3 How am I missing this?

Post by secretad » Mon May 02, 2011 3:01 pm

The correct answer is A because it weakens the conclusion of the campaign being unsuccessful.

However, why isn't E considered correct for weakening the idea that the campaign was largely unsuccessful? If they do not include profits from overseasa customers, that could account for a lot of revenue and thus the revenues haven't really been declining, thus weakening the conclusion of the reading campaign being unsuccessful.

lsatter

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Re: PT 54, Section 2, LR, #3 How am I missing this?

Post by lsatter » Mon May 02, 2011 4:24 pm

There were "national campaigns" to encourage people to read more fiction.

Answer E refers to "overseas customers", who by definition were international, and thus not included in the campaigns. They may be buying less or more, but that's irrelevant to the success of the national campaign.

SanDiegoJake

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Re: PT 54, Section 2, LR, #3 How am I missing this?

Post by SanDiegoJake » Mon May 02, 2011 4:33 pm

Furthermore, the campaign was to encourage people to read more fiction.

Answer choice A shows the non-representativeness of the evidence (declining fiction sales in bookstores) by showing increased fiction sales via mail order.

Answer choice E, on the other hand, simply states that overseas sales of novels were not counted in the survey. Novels are not necessarily the same thing as "fiction", so answer A more seriously weakens the argument. Further, just because the profits were not counted, there is no evidence to say that there were any profits at all. Perhaps there were no overseas profits.

While E "may" weaken the argument, A certainly weakens the argument.

In general, my advice is that when you are down to 2 answer choices, focus on why one answer choice may be worse than the other, and eliminate that one, rather than looking for why one answer choice may be better and selecting that one. Specifically, it's not about why you think answer choice E is good that matters. It's about the fact that there's nothing about answer choice A that is bad.

Focus on why answer choices could be wrong rather than why answer choices could be right. I hope this helps!

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