Logical reasoning PrepTest 123 · Section 3 · Question 22

Question prompt

If the price it 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

Facts

Question Type

Must Be True Questions / Sufficient & Necessary Questions

Stimulus Summary

Bean price ↑ → CS ↑ prices
CS ↑ prices → Sell noncoffee products OR Coffee sales ↓
Sell noncoffee products → ↓ Profits
not ↓ Profits → not Coffee sales ↓

Answer Anticipation

There's a lot of overlap in the conditional statements here, including in the last one, but we have to take the contrapositive there to see it: Coffee sales ↓ → ↓ Profits. We also have to be careful with that OR statement to make sure that we don't split it up in a way that is illogical. If CS prices do go up, we don't know which of the two options they'll end up taking (or if they'll do both, which is possible), so this isn't a statement we can break up (if the necessary condition featured an AND statement, then we could split it up).

Answer choices

  1. A
    If the Coffee Shoppe's Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice A is not credited
    Incorrect. The overall profitability decreasing is the necessary condition of the whole chain, so an answer that has it as a sufficient condition must be incorrect.
  2. B
    If the Coffee Shoppe's Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice B is not credited
    Incorrect. The overall profitability decreasing is the necessary condition of the whole chain, so an answer that has it as a sufficient condition must be incorrect.
  3. C
    The Coffee Shoppe's overall Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice C matches the stem
    Correct. Bean price ↑ → ↓ Profits. This answer choice matches the conditional chain from our anticipation, so it's correct.
  4. D
    The price it pays Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice D is not credited
    Incorrect. not ↓ Profits → not Bean price ↓. A complicated conditional statement! While profits not decreasing is a sufficient condition for not Bean price ↑, that's different from this answer, which has not Bean price ↓ as the necessary condition. Definitely a tricky answer!
  5. E
    Either the price it Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice E is not credited
    Incorrect. A good way to analyze an either/or in a Must Be True question is to see if both can be false. Can not Bean price ↑ while not Coffee sales ↑? Sure. Coffee bean price not increasing is a necessary condition of a chain, so it doesn't guarantee anything else is true and thus doesn't impact coffee sales. And coffee sales not decreasing is part of an AND conditional, so it only guarantees something if there is another factor that's true. Since both of the either/or terms can be false at the same time, the either/or statement doesn't have to be true.

What this tests

Question analytics

Based on historical answer selection rates for this question.

Answer choice distribution

  1. A 11%
  2. B 36%
  3. C Credited 42%
  4. D 7%
  5. E 4%

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