Prep Test 28 - Section 1 - #20 LR Question Forum

[a11 1n]

Can anyone help me out with this question? I generally breeze through LR but this one makes no sense to me whatsoever. I would appreciate an explanation of why A is right and why the others are wrong.

Thanks!

[yoni45]

Can anyone help me out with this question? I generally breeze through LR but this one makes no sense to me whatsoever. I would appreciate an explanation of why A is right and why the others are wrong.

Thanks!

Well, to set up the relevant conditionals here, we know that:

EconomyWeak --> PricesConstant & UnemploymentRises
~PricesConstant OR ~UnemploymentRises --> ~EconomyWeak

UnemploymentRises --> InvestmentDecreases
~InvestmentDecrease --> ~UnemploymentRise

It's also established that investment is *not* decreasing, thus we know that this is in play:

~InvestmentDecrease -> ~UnemploymentRise -> ~EconomyWeak

(A), in stating "Either the economy is weak or investment is decreasing" is impossible, because that means we must have *at least* one of those two. But we know that investment isn't decreasing, thus it must be the other. But we also know the economy is not weak. In other words, we know neither of those can be true, therefore it must be false that at least one of them is true.

(B) While we don't know that a rise in unemployment makes prices constant, there's nothing necessarily wrong with such a condition being in play.

The same applies to the rest -- we don't know that these conditionals exist, but there's nothing about them that makes them necessarily false.

[a11 1n]

Thank you for the breakdown Yoni! Took some thinking to get through but I get it now.

Much appreciated!