Q5 - Television executives recently announced

[dayme11]

Please explain why the answer is E instead of D. Thanks!

[bbirdwell]

We have this conclusion: Television advertising will not be harder to sell next year, despite rising costs for those ads.

And this evidence:
Advertisers will continue to profit.

We are asked to strengthen the argument, so we need to provide a reason for the advertisers to continue buying ads despite the significant increase in cost. We have to make sure that the rising costs don't outweigh the continuing profits.

(E) does this by showing that people are watching more and more television. This fact supports the idea that advertisers will continue to buy ads.

As for the other answers:

(A) is about the cost of the products--out of scope. If anything, this makes it less likely companies can afford the pricier ads!

(B) is out of scope. Size rating system?

(C) might actually weaken the argument--if companies can no longer purchase the smaller chunks of advertising, they may be even less able to afford ads.

(D) does not help at all. It simply splits the field of advertisers in two and says that one is buying more and the other less. Without more data, we cannot know how this affects the actual numbers. Perhaps far more advertisers fall into the category that is decreasing. This would actually weaken the argument.

[LSAT-Chang]

Would answer choice (C) not strengthen the argument because we don't know how long advertising time was this fall? At first I was tempted by this answer because I thought: "hmm 30 seconds does sound very little -- so if advertisers were given more than 30 seconds for their purchase than they would be more likely to buy those times" but that might have been an additional assumption I made on my side since advertisers could have had more than 30 seconds this fall but had paid less for it than what they would have to pay next fall. Am I correct?

[zee.brad]

Would answer choice (C) not strengthen the argument because we don't know how long advertising time was this fall? At first I was tempted by this answer because I thought: "hmm 30 seconds does sound very little -- so if advertisers were given more than 30 seconds for their purchase than they would be more likely to buy those times" but that might have been an additional assumption I made on my side since advertisers could have had more than 30 seconds this fall but had paid less for it than what they would have to pay next fall. Am I correct?

Okay, here is my thought regarding answer choice C. We don't know for sure if they would like to buy ads longer than 30 secs or not, and we even don't know if the 30secs threshold sounds or not, so C doesn't make a good choice comparing with E, which we know for sure, more people watching, more potential customers, and more profit they will potentially earn, so the bigger chance they will continue to buy those ads time.

[bbirdwell]

that might have been an additional assumption I made on my side

Yep. So easy to do this when evaluating answer choices. When in doubt, err on the side of sticking closely to what is mentioned in the argument.

Here, the length of actual commercials is not mentioned, so any inclusion of that concept into our reasoning will require additional assumptions. As zee.brad pointed out, we have no idea what the significance of the 30 second minimum will be; perhaps zero blocks less than 30 seconds were purchased last year anyway -- without more data (or assumptions), we can't know.

[wj097]

(E) does this by showing that people are watching more and more television. This fact supports the idea that advertisers will continue to buy ads.

I have 2 interpretation as to why (E) is correct, but not sure which one is the proper approach.
1. It strengthens the conclusion on an separate independent base regardless of the premise.
2. It strengthens the argument by defending from possible situation that undermines the necessary assumption ("other factor has not changed significantly to outweigh the continued profitable TV ad selling environment")

Thx

[noah]

I have 2 interpretation as to why (E) is correct, but not sure which one is the proper approach.
1. It strengthens the conclusion on an separate independent base regardless of the premise.
2. It strengthens the argument by defending from possible situation that undermines the necessary assumption ("other factor has not changed significantly to outweigh the continued profitable TV ad selling environment")
Thx

It's rare that a strengthen/weaken answer will go after the conclusion instead of the argument. I see this fitting into the majority. The argument's assumption, as you reference, is that there isn't some other factor that makes the continued profits outweighed by the rising costs. (E) tells us that indeed, the outweighing has not happened.

Thinking aloud here: does (E) really support the conclusion very well? I don't think so. Just because viewership is going up can we say it'll be no harder to sell ads next fall? That's a pretty weak argument since there are so many reasons ads could be harder to sell regardless of rising viewership.

[cvfh17]

I know that E sounds better than D, The conclusion says that the advertisement time will be no harder to sell, but D says that advertisement time pruchased is increasing, and time for ad purchased is decreasing. so the fact that are purchasing less time on the ad doesn't mean that are not purchasing television advertisemt in general. It's not harder to sell.