Q6 - The most successful economies

[vik]

Does the stimulus imply a conditional?
Most successful economies --> trains people in technology

[geverett]

Yea that basically gets at it.

The most successful economies will be the ones that train as many people as possible.

Most successful econ. -----> train as many as poss.


So if you are the most successful economy then you are necessarily training as many people as possible from your human workforce. Be careful though. For a minute I thought this relationship could go both ways, but just because you are training as many people as possible does not mean that you are one of the most successful economies. For example: what if your workforce is only 5 people, and they are all trained. Does that mean you are the most successful economy? Not necessarily. Good question.

[alovitt]

Could someone explain why it must be true that training more people in new technologies is necessary, rather than just sufficent, to be economically MORE (not most) successful?

[giladedelman]

Aw geez, Prep Test 1? Come on, guys ...

Heh heh, anyway, as the above post explains, we can read the stimulus as saying that if you're one of the "most" successful economies, then you are training as many people as possible in these technologies. Since it then says that Europe isn't training enough people, we can say that Europe is not one of the "most" successful economies. So we can infer that to become one of the "most" successful, it would have to train more people.

How can we say this is necessary for Europe to be "more" successful? I agree, we can't really infer this, but this answer stinks way less than the other four:

(A) is totally out, it never compares engineers vs. researchers.

(B) is out because all we know is that Japan is a model for this kind of training, so if anything it is a good comparison.

(C) is incorrect because the stimulus never says whether Japan's economy is actually successful.

(E) is totally out of scope; we have no clue how Europe stacks up to the competition.

So (D) is the best of the bunch.

[dragonliwenxu]

For C, the use of "uncommonly narrow" is inappropriate because at least European countries are in the same situation too.

[SeyoungK790]

Actually I had a very hard time in reading this stimulus so.... hope that my way of solving this question could be validated.

1) I presumed the sentence
"The most successful economies have been, and will continue to be, those that train as many people as possible ..." as conditionals.
Cuz the most successful economies always train as many people as possible

I presumed the correlation between economic success and training people as many as possible, but causal relationship has not been proven yet.
And I predicted that the contents further proving the causal relationship between training ppl and economic success, whether it is direct or indirect.
So, when the stimulus below only talks about the difference between JPN and Europe training labor-wise, I wondered where the "economic success" goes..

So I picked "economic success" as the key part that I have to supplement for the valid reasoning as the author supposed.
And D and E, seemingly, correspond to my criteria above so I chose the two of them first,
But we are taking about Europe, and Japan only, so we'd never know how the other countries are on the basis of stimulus,
therefore, the other countries, mentioned in E is surely out of scope
(Of course, contents-wise, it is not a correct answer)

So, I ultimately reached to D.
Is there any other people who solved the question as I did?
Would my way of solving question be on the right track?
Please help.
Thanks.

[smiller]

Thanks for your patience. We're catching up with a few questions that slipped by us.

As we're reading the stimulus, economic success definitely stands out as a central issue. The one thing I'm wondering while reading your explanation is if you correctly identified the type of question this is. You wrote,

"And I predicted that the contents further proving the causal relationship between training ppl and economic success..."

and

"So I picked "economic success" as the key part that I have to supplement for the valid reasoning as the author supposed."

It seems as if you're trying to predict and choose an answer that supports the reasoning in the stimulus. But this isn't that type of question. This is an Inference question. We aren't looking for an argument in the stimulus. Our task is to pick the answer that is a valid conclusion based on the evidence presented in the stimulus. We're essentially treating the statements in the stimulus as premises, then looking for the answer choice that can be supported by these premises.

Does this help, or did I misunderstand your explanation?