Logical reasoning PrepTest 103 · Section 3 · Question 21

Question prompt

The companies that are Remaining source text redacted.
Why the credited answer is right

Credited answer: C

The notes below walk through why it fits the stem and how to eliminate the rest.

Argument or Facts

Argument

Valid or Flawed

Flawed

Question Type

Strengthen with Sufficient Premise Questions

Stimulus Summary

Training costs high → ~Prime purchasers buy
Memorize unfamiliar commands → Training costs high
Therefore - Memorize unfamiliar commands → ~Successful

Answer Anticipation

Strengthen with Sufficient Premise questions frequently deal with conditional logic, and this one falls into that pattern. Each statement is a conditional, and there are overlapping terms, so this is a Sufficient Premise question that is going to have a gap in a conditional chain (not one that applies a conditional to a specific situation).
Let’s walk through our diagram, and then anticipate our answer. Especially since there is a bit of a wrinkle here!
The first conditional is relatively straightforward, using “if” as a sufficient condition indicator.
The second conditional is a bit more difficult. It has the word “demands,” which can indicate a necessary condition, but that’s not how it’s used here. Instead, that “demands” is a part of the sufficient condition - if something requires memorizing unfamiliar commands, then it’ll be expensive to train people to use it. There isn’t a clear conditional indicator word here, but it includes an overlapping concept with the opening conditional, so we should work to get this diagram.
That wrinkle appears in the necessary condition, as well, where “cannot require” ends up being a part of the sufficient condition, telling us that anything that does require such commands will not be successful.
With that noted, we can see that “~Successful” is a new concept brought up in the conclusion, so we should build a chain with the premises that matches up with the other term, and then find the gap:
Conclusion - Memorize unfamiliar commands → ~Successful

Answer choices

  1. A
    If most prime purchasers Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice A is not credited
    First, this talks about “most” prime purchasers, which is a quantifier missing from the stimulus. Second, even ignoring that, this answer is an illegal negation of the answer we’re looking for. The conclusion sets up a sufficient condition for software being unsuccessful, and this answer has a sufficient condition for success.

  2. B
    Commercial computer software that Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice B is not credited
    First, this answer talks about relative expense (“no more expensive”), not absolute, as in the stimulus (“costs...are high”). Second, it talks about the cost of the software, whereas the stimulus talks about training costs.

  3. C
    Commercial computer software will Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice C matches the stem
    ~Prime purchasers buy → ~Successful. This answer matches our anticipation, adding to the end of the premise chain to build to the conclusion. It is therefore the correct answer. (We treated the “unless” in this answer as “if not,” but if you used another method and ended up with the contrapositive, you should have determined that this answer matched the contrapositive of our anticipation and still selected it.)

  4. D
    If the initial cost Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice D is not credited
    The stimulus talks about software with high training costs, so this answer is out of scope

  5. E
    The more difficult it Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice E is not credited
    This answer creates a proportional/comparative relationship between difficulty of learning and expense of training, whereas the stimulus is about high costs. Also, there’s a gap between memorizing unfamiliar commands and being difficult to learn - it could be easy to memorize commands, just time-consuming!

What this tests

Question analytics

Based on historical answer selection rates for this question.

Answer choice distribution

  1. A 13%
  2. B 13%
  3. C Credited 54%
  4. D 8%
  5. E 12%

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