Prep Test 30 - section 2 - question 17 - LR Forum

[Jimjones]

Can someone help me with this one?

I see the potential flaw being the author assuming that the 600 largest corporate boardrooms = the most important. However this is not one of the answer choices and all the others strike me as wrong.

[Cambridge LSAT]

For the service professions to be underrepresented, the relative representation must be lower than the relative representation of other professions. Consider this hypothetical case:
X professions (0.2% are boardmembers)
Y professions (0.2% are boardmembers)
Z professions (0.2% are boardmembers)
service professions (0.2% are boardmembers)

In this case, although a small percentage (0.2) of each group of professions is represented in boardrooms, the relative percentages of representation are equal. The speaker's argument would be akin to someone claiming that X, Y, or Z professions are underrepresented solely based on the fact that a small percentage of the professionals in these groups are boardmembers.

Choice B illustrates the difference between these two statements:
a small percentage of service professionals are boardmembers (in the stimulus)
a small percentage of boardmembers are service professionals (not in the stimulus)

If the number of service professionals is substantially large, even a small percentage could represent a large chunk of the boardmembers of these 600 companies.

[Shrimps]

Oh, c'mon. Only a few thousand people altogether sit on the boards of the big 600. Not just only a small percentage of people in the service professions, but a tiny percentage of ALL Americans, regardless of what they do, sit on the board of the 600 largest corporations. That's the flaw in logic/statistics. In order to assess how under/over represented services people are in boardrooms, we need to compare their percentage among members of the boards with, say, their percentage among all corporate employees. We certainly do not want to compare them with ALL the services professionals.

(A) tries to make you think that the flaw is the sweeping generalization. But the question says "the most important boardrooms in North America", and "most important" could certainly be limited to the 600 largest.
(B) is the clumsily worded right answer. Read it carefully. Right answers on LSAT are often very poorly worded.
(C) the question does not ask about "typical" corporate boardrooms. Only "the most important" ones.
(D) is very wrong. The text did not mention small corporations at all
(E) we're not talking about social responsibility at all.

So you would've arrived at B even if you misunderstood what it said. The other choices are too obviously false.

[Jimjones]

Thanks very much for taking the time to answer my question. Much appreciated!