Q13 - The only way that bookstores

[weiyichen1986]

Hey there, I pick B in this one.

The logic chain seems very massy and i could not figure out why B is wrong, can anyone explain to me? Thank you

[giladedelman]

Thanks for your post!

I think you had the right instinct: since we have a bunch of conditional statements, we should try to chain them together. Let's see how that would work.

The only way that bookstores can profitably sell books at below market prices is to get the books at a discount from publishers.

That means profitably selling books at below market prices requires getting the books at a discount:

PBM --> D

Unless bookstores generate a high sales volume, however, they cannot get discounts from publishers.

That means to get a discount, you MUST generate a high sales volume:

D --> HSV

To generate such volume, bookstores must either cater to mass tastes or have exclusive access to a large specialized market, such as medical textbooks, or both.

So generating high sales volume requires catering to mass tastes or having exclusive access to blah blah:

HSV --> CMT or EA

We can chain these together like this:

PBM --> D --> HSV --> CMT or EA

Now we just have to find the answer choice that matches our logic chain.

(C) is correct, and would you look at that -- it only depends on the first statement, the first part of the chain! This is just repeating our statement PBM --> D, that is, if you profitably sell books at below market prices, you must be getting discounts from publishers.

(A) is the reversal of the above statement.

(B) is a reversal of the last conditional relationship.

(D) is sort of a negation of the first step, but it's also out of scope because it doesn't mention profitability.

(E) contradicts the last statement.

Does that answer your question? Even though the right answer only depended on the first step in the chain, mapping out the conditionals still helped us evaluate the other choices.