Logical reasoning PrepTest 102 · Section 3 · Question 3

NA

Must Be True Questions

Recession → Decrease in consumer spending → Businesses fire people → Fired people can’t find new jobs → Increase in jobless Recovery from a recession = Increase in consumer spending AND Expansion of business activity → Need for Hiring Businesspeople delay hiring because of a lack of confidence

There are a lot of connections in this stimulus! And a lot of them are presented in line, with individual sentences outlining several connections. That’s largely what happens through the first three sentences, so we just ran them all together instead of trying to create each of them individually. Note that this is a bit of a cheat. The first connection is causal, not conditional (although since it’s certain causality, so it’s also conditional), and fired people only usually can’t find new jobs. However, for an early-in-the-section question, these connections will probably be good enough, and if more than one answer lines up with it, we can always dig back in to see which individual answer matches with the causality/strength of the stimulus, and which doesn’t. After those connections, we get a definition of what recovery from a recession entails, and then it’s noted that businesspeople delay a part of that recovery because of a lack of confidence. So there are two parts to this stimulus - the recession part, and the recovery part. The recession part has a chain that we wrote out. The recovery part has two statements, and they overlap in talking about rehiring people, so we should make an inference from that. Here, the inference to be made is that businesspeople can often delay hiring people after a recession is over, despite there being a need for additional workers, because they’re not confident in the recovery. We have inferences from both “parts” of the stimulus now, so let’s look to the answers to see which one matches up with these inferences!