Q18 - Economist: Machinery firms in this country

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Inference (most strongly supported)

Stimulus Breakdown:
Machinery firms say that they need to continue receiving protection from foreign firms for several more years in order to grow big enough to successfully compete. But they've been protected for ten years, and if this protection were really able to help them grow big enough, it would have happened within ten years.

Answer Anticipation:
Whenever we see a conditional in Inference questions, we start asking ourselves whether we can chain this together with other conditionals or apply this conditional to any provided facts. The first and second sentences are facts that trigger the contrapositive of the conditional rule in the third sentence. We've protected these firms for ten years and they still aren't big enough to compete.

The contrapositive says "If ten years isn't sufficient for them to be big enough to compete, then it's impossible for foreign protection to enable that." So we can infer "it's not possible for protection from foreign competition to enable our firms to grow big enough to compete".

Correct Answer:
E

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) We don't have any information about how commonly protection enables firms to grow. We only know that in THIS case it doesn't seem to be working. Our rule is only about whether it's possible for protection to enable THIS country's firms to grow big enough.

(B) Way too strong. Ten years is enough to assess ANY economic policy?

(C) Way too strong. NONE of the firms have grown significantly? We also care less about whether they've grown significantly, and more about whether they’ve grown "big enough to compete".

(D) Way too strong/specific. "Most"? More than 50% of firms will go out of business? We have no information that lets us quantify the risk to these firms.

(E) YUP, this is just outputting the consequence of the contrapositive. If ten years wasn't enough, then it's not possible for protection to enable these fims to grow big enough. Ten years wasn't enough, so it's not possible for protection to enable these firms to grow big enough.

Takeaway/Pattern: This is a pretty classic Inference question --- the correct answer comes from combining facts using Conditional / Causal / Quantitative. In this case, we had a conditional and we had facts that triggered its contrapositive. The consequence of that contrapositive is the inference being tested. Meanwhile, incorrect answers were frequently too strong / too specific ("rarely if ever" / "any" / "none" / "most").

#officialexplanation

[BarryM800]

Patrick's formal logic approach to this question is eye-opening. A quick question, how do I diagram the third sentence then?

"If it were possible for protection from foreign competition to enable this country's machinery firms to grow big enough to compete successfully with foreign rivals, ten years would be a sufficient time frame for this to happen."

Specifically, which part is the sufficient condition - the "if" clause or "ten years"? Thanks!

[Laura Damone]

Hi there!

The "if" clause will always be the sufficient condition, so you can diagram this one:

Possible for protection to enable enough growth to compete --> 10 years is enough

Now, you obviously wouldn't write all that down on your scratch paper, but that's how you should be thinking about the conditional relationship.

In terms of what you might actually draw out, this one is pretty hairy. Rather than try to come up with the perfect shorthand to represent that very long sufficient condition, I'd do something like so:

PP --> 10 y E

Knowing that 10 years was not enough allows me to apply the contrapositive and conclude that it's impossible for protection to enable enough growth to compete. And I'm not going to worry about diagramming that because the right answer is going to be a sentence, not a diagram. Once I see that I'm going to use the contrapositive, I just look for an answer that states the negation of the sufficient condition.

Hope this helps!