Q9 - Marketing agent: A survey of my business

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: 90% of business clients increased their profits at least tenfold.
Evidence: Of those who made a profit, 90% of business clients increased profits at least tenfold.

Answer Anticipation:
Okay …. What about the clients who DIDN'T make a profit? This argument is saying, "90% of my clients that are doing well are doing really well. Thus, my clients are doing really well." Well, shouldn't we look at ALL your clients, since you're conclusion is about 90% of ALL your business clients, not just 90% of your PROFITABLE business clients?

Correct Answer:
C

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Would this weaken? No, because even slightly over $100k is still increasing at least tenfold.

(B) Does the author need to explain WHY the 10% of profitable business clients didn't go up tenfold? No, because the conclusion has nothing to do with WHY. It has only to do with numbers. Have 90% of business clients gone up tenfold or not? WHY they may or may not have is beyond the scope.

(C) Does this match? Is the conclusion about "all business clients"? Yes. Is the premise about "profitable business clients"? Yes. So it's correct. We KNOW about 90% of profitable business clients, but we don't know about 90% of all busines clients. So that shift is crucial to the reasoning problem here.

(D) Did this argument commit the Conditional Logic flaw? No, there was no conditional logic in the evidence.

(E) Would this weaken? No, because the author only said that 90% of business clients have gone up tenfold. It doesn't conflict at all to point out to the author that at least one business client did not go up that much. She already believes that 10% of business clients didn't go up tenfold.

Takeaway/Pattern: People may miss the qualifier ", of those who made a profit last year," on a first read. That qualifier is the essence of the flaw: the author is speaking about a subset of her business clients, but then she suddenly concludes about the totality of her business clients. If we missed that, then we hopefully find it by re-reading the argument several times. There's no issue with the math. $100,000 is definitely at least ten times bigger than any number $10,000 or lower. So the issue has to be with the language, which forces us to examine "90% of my business clients" vs. "Of those who made a profit last year, 90% ..."

#officialexplanation

[AnnaM54]

It looks like some sort of self advertisement. Not talking about task though.