Q5 - Northwoods Maple Syrup, made the old-fashioned way

[cuong.fearlessboy]

is D the better answer than C because C simply attacks the source of the argument, that is the survey's reliability, rather than the argument itself?
Can someone please explain?

[timmydoeslsat]

This syrup is tops for taste.

Why?

7 out of 10 shoppers surveyed stated they preferred it to all others.

Does a preference for this syrup reflect the reason for it? Must it be the taste? Could it not be the price?

The issue with this ad is that it makes a jump from preference for the syrup to a conclusion about taste.

With answer choice C, this is what we would expect a survey to do. When you see political polls, the number of people actually surveyed is usually less than 2,000. And these polls reflect the views of over 300 million people! With surveys, we want to make sure that they are representative. And we have no reason to believe that this is unrepresentative.

[moriah.cenance]

I'm not sure why C isn't correct. The stimulus never stated that the survey was representative

[ohthatpatrick]

It never says that it IS representative, but it also never says that it isn't. We should have some reason for suspecting the sample isn't representative if that's our complaint. (Also, representativeness is usually only going to result in a misleading survey result if the group being polled happens to be biased in favor of a certain answer ... like don't ask people "which is better: iPhone or Samsung Galaxy?" on the corporate campus of Samsung).

With surveys, LSAT wants us to be on the lookout for
- inadequate sample size
- unrepresentative sample
- truthful answers? pressured to respond a certain way?

(C) addresses the sample size. It does not suggest that the sample size was too small. In fact, a sizable minority sounds like a big sample size ("sizable").

(C) applies to all market surveys ... so it's a little weird to indict ALL market surveys as unusable evidence. A small sample size is like under 100 people. But even the most robust samples are still just like 1000-5000 people. So it will always be true that ANY respectable survey still only covers a minority of the total population.

=== complete explanation for this problem ====

Question Type: Flaw

Argument Core:

conclusion
NWS is tops for taste

(why? here's the proof)

evidence
7 out of 10 surveyed said they only buy NMS

ANALYSIS
Pretty big jump there from "only buy NMS" to "best tasting".

If we wanted to debate the conclusion and argue that NMS is NOT the most tasty syrup, we'd need to come up with some alternative explanation for why many people are only buying NMS.


(A) This is the opposite of what it would need to be to be an objection. If 90% of shoppers had no preference for syrup, then it would be hard to argue that NMS is tops for taste. But this choice is saying the noncommittal group is tiny, not large.

(B) The descriptive filler about being made the old-fashioned way is not something we're here to debate. We're only debating whether inferring something about "taste" is fair on the basis of people saying "this is the only syrup I buy".

(C) Described above. We don't expect surveys to cover more than a sizable minority. If you have a sample size of at least a few hundred people and it's thought to be representative, then you have a pretty trustworthy sample.

(D) Bingo! The ad is misleading if the people who only buy NWS do so because of its price, not its taste.

If we're debating the author's conclusion and saying, "NWS is NOT tops for taste", then we'll need an alternative explanation for why 70% of people only buy NWS. This answer brings up a compelling possibility: maybe they just buy the cheapest syrup and that's NWS.

(E) The discussion here is only about maple syrups, so bringing up other types of syrup doesn't hurt the advertisements claim.