Q4 - Pundit: the average salary

[ngogirl]

I was down to B and C and went with C. My justification was if sports players are playing for a shorter period of time, then their increased salaries make up for the discrepancy with teachers salaries.

Any thoughts?

[farhadshekib]

I was down to B and C and went with C. My justification was if sports players are playing for a shorter period of time, then their increased salaries make up for the discrepancy with teachers salaries.

Any thoughts?

I got to B because I thought the other choices were irrelevant.

Lets break it down:

P1: Average salary for teachers = less than average salary for athletes.

Conclusion: pundits society -- values sports > education.

My thought process:

i) The premise talks about average salaries for athletes vs teachers, but then concludes about societal values.

Assumption: average salaries reflects societal values.

ii) The premise discusses average salaries for both groups, but does not mention the total budget allotted to both groups in that society.

Think about it: what if there are far more teachers than professional athletes in the pundit's society?

For example, we have:

- 80 teachers in that society (Annual budget: $400; average salary per teacher - $5.00/yr).

- 20 athletes in that society (Annual budget: $390; average salary per athlete - $19.5/ yr).

B - points out this flaw. It suggests that, while teachers make less, on average, than athletes, the total amount of money spent on education (e.g. $400) is greater than the total spent on sport (e.g. $390).

C - is irrelevant. So what if both teachers and athletes do not work all year-round?

The argument does not claim that athletes work less often than teachers, but are paid more, so society values sports more than education.

[jamiejames]

I got the answer to this one mainly by getting rid of the 4 answers I thought were wrong.

a) Nope, this isn't what the argument is suggesting at all. This answer just merges together education and sports, and the speaker doesn't do that.

c) This is out of scope. If this were true, it doesn't tell us anything about society valuing either one more or less than the other

d) Once again, we're not talking about other proffessions, we're only talking about teachers and athletes. If we brought in lawyers, then the argument would change, and so would the conclusion, so d is out of scope.

e) this is also out of scope. What does comparing the teacher's salaries in America to teacher's salaries in Japan or Ireland have to do with whether our society values sports more than education. It doesn't, so e is out.

this essentially leaves us with B.

But, if you want to find out why B is correct, then my answer would be that if our society didn't pay teachers as much as athletes, however, they poured billions of dollars into new schools, sports equipment, after school activities, buses for transporting children to and from school, and other education related things, and only gave a couple millions to athletes, and not much to build new stadiums, then we could argue that while teachers aren't paid as much as athletes, society contributes more to education in general than they do the sports, so they may value education more than sports if this is the case.

[deedubbew]

I thought the stimulus was referring to teachers in that society compared to salaries of general athletes. Thus, making E much more attractive.