Q7 - Economic growth accelerates

[samuelfbaron]

This is a most strongly supported question type. Essentially we will be inferring what can possibly be true from a set of facts or statements:

Economic growth --> accelerate business demand for new technology

Not many businesses businesses supplying new technology.

However, there is a lot of demand for them.

Acceleration of technological change (could be considered new technology) --> suppliers and buyers of new technology to fail.

(A) Unsupported. We don't know the circumstances under which businesses flourish.

(B) Maybe? Let's keep it and proceed with other answers.

(C) We can't infer this at all. We don't know anything about what causes economic growth in general.

(D) Again, unsupported.

(E) Close. Let's keep it as well.

So down to (B) and (E).

(E) seems a little strong. Economic growth increases business failures. We know that economic growth increases demand for new technology and that in turn can cause suppliers and and buyers of new technology to fail. Seems a bit strong. Kill it.

(B) This seems to match the tone of the statements. Suppliers of new technology might not always benefit from economic growth. Economic growth --> increase in demand for new technology --> This change CAN cause suppliers to fail.

I found this question to be a bit confusing to be in the first 10 questions.

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

Nice samuelfbaron! You've got it, answer choice is supported by the combination of the first and last statement in the stimulus.

I don't see this as out of line for difficulty level though. The toughest LR question I ever saw occurred Q12 in the section. And it's quite common for a question or two in the first ten questions to be on the high-side of the LSAC's difficulty rating.

Tough, but fair.

[michellemyxu]

For (B) to be correct, we need to assume "accelerated business demand for the development of new technologies" equals to or leads to "accelerated technological change", don't we? And can we assume that?

[at9037]

Is E wrong because it’s too broad? Bceause it generally talks about business failures and not those related to new technology?

[ohthatpatrick]

Inference questions are about what claim you can (essentially) prove from the provided information.

Would you rather attempt to prove that:
"Sometimes economic growth can hurt a certain type of business"
or try to prove that:
"Economic growth always increases business failures"

That's the starting point for comparing (B) to (E).

It's WAY easier to prove 'sometimes' (only need one example) than to prove 'always' (need to consider every possible example ever).

Now ask yourself, "Why are we reading (E) and inserting the word 'always' into that claim?"

Though (E) sounds subtle, it is saying something that is still categorical and certain.

In the facts we were given, they said that economic growth always speeds up demand for technological change. But they said that technological change can lead to business failures.

'can' is as weak as 'sometimes'. It only needs to happen once to be true.

So (B) is within the power of our evidence. We know of one instance when economic growth was bad for business, and that's all we need to support (B).

Because we only know of at least one instance where economic growth was bad for business, we don't have much to support the categorical certainty of (E).