Q5 - Professor: During election years, voters often feel

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Explain/Resolve

Stimulus Breakdown:
BACKGROUND: During election years, we feel guilty that we're not adequately informed about election issues.

SURPRISE: Even the people who regularly subscribe to the few papers that provide lots of election coverage are no better informed than people who subscribe to papers that barely cover these issue.

Answer Anticipation:
GIVEN THAT these people subscribe to newspapers that actually do great coverage of election issues,
HOW COME they're no better informed than people who subscribe to other papers that don't cover much in terms of election issues?

My first thoughts --- the people reading the good election-papers don't read that part of the paper. They read Sports or do the crossword, but they don't read the election coverage parts of the paper. Or, the people reading the bad election-papers are getting their election news elsewhere (TV / internet), so they end up being just as well informed.

Correct Answer:
C

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Circulation doesn't matter. Even if it's 100 readers vs. 1000 readers, we still want to know why those 100 aren't ending up more informed in virtue of subscribing to a paper that covers election issues well.

(B) We don't care about the past histories of these papers. The mystery is about their current state. Why are the ones with great election coverage not ending up with more informed readers than the ones without great election coverage.

(C) YES, this works. The people who subscribe to NYTimes just to do the crossword and read the sports page don't end up benefiting from the thorough election coverage.

(D) This has no bearing on solving the mystery about THIS group of newspaper readers vs. THAT group of newspaper readers.

(E) This is tempting, but this doesn't do a good job distinguishing between the two different groups of newspaper readers. Even if most people get most of their election info from non-newspaper sources, we could still expect that people who subscribe to a paper that provides extensive coverage could be BETTER informed. In other words, maybe 60% of people get 60% of their election info from tv / internet. Given the first sentence, that might still amount to relatively little info, since we know voters often feel uninformed. So there is still a lot of room for becoming more informed than others, via a newspaper that has extensive election coverage.

Takeaway/Pattern: When we get down to (C) and (E), we should definitely ask ourselves, "Which one is stronger? Which does more to help explain?" With (C), we don't need to think about anything else. The fact that the people subscribing to the good election-papers aren't reading the election coverage is enough to let us understand why this group doesn't end up being more informed. With (E), we have to add some assumptions, that because most voters get most of their info from non-newspaper sources, they've all reached a similar high level of being informed, and that therefore reading a newspaper with extensive coverage of election issues wouldn't give those readers an extra boost in terms of how informed they are.

#officialexplanation