Logical reasoning PrepTest 139 · Section 4 · Question 22

Incorrect. This answer describes an illegal negation, and it correctly identifies the changes being raised as being necessary to the continued growth in circulation ("without these changes . . . "). However, the argument doesn't conclude that no other changes are needed—it concludes that the magazine won't become the best-selling martial arts magazine. This mismatch between the description of the argument in this answer and the argument itself is enough to rule it out.

Incorrect. The premises never address a decrease in circulation. The first premise discusses what will happen if the magazine's circulation continues to rise at the current pace. The second sentence discusses a situation that will prevent the circulation from rising at the same rate. Therefore, the term shift from this answer choice isn't present in the stimulus.

Incorrect. This argument isn't circular—there are no premises saying that the magazine won't be the best-selling martial arts magazine. Rather, the premises discuss what would or wouldn't lead to that happening.

Incorrect. First, if a general claim is stated in absolute terms, then a single counterexample is enough to show that the general claim is false—if it says, "All flowers smell good," one bad-smelling flower would show it to be false. Second, the conclusion isn't that a general claim is false but rather that a specific future state won't come to pass.

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Argument

Valid or Flawed:
Flawed

Question Type:
Errors in Reasoning

Stimulus Summary:
Circulation goes up as much over next decade as past → Largest-selling martial arts magazine in the world
Publisher won't let manager make changes
not Changes → not Circulation goes up as much over next decade as past
Therefore - not Largest-selling martial arts magazine in the world

Answer Anticipation:
There's a lot of conditional logic in this stimulus, so we should start to see if the argument commits an illegal reversal or negation. And we should immediately determine that it does.

Why? Because the conclusion is that the martial arts magazine won't be the largest-selling one in the world. That term does show up in the premises, but it shows up without the negation as a necessary condition. In other words, the stimulus provides a sufficient condition for the magazine to become the best-selling martial arts magazine in the world, but not one for it to fail to do so.

Where exactly does the conditional logic break down? Working through the premises, we can see that the non-conditional premise triggers the second conditional. The publisher refusing to let the editing manager make changes does guarantee that circulation won't continue to go up at the same pace as over the past decade. However, that is the negation of the sufficient condition of the first conditional. The argument treats establishing that the sufficient condition of that statement guarantees that the necessary condition won't come to pass—an illegal negation.

The correct answer will either address this negation abstractly, or it'll bring it up through a discussion of the content—something like, "It assumes that the only way the magazine can become the best-selling martial arts magazine in the world is to continue to see the same circulation growth as over the past decade."

Answer Explanation:
This answer abstractly describes an illegal reversal/negation. The circulation continuing to rise is established as a sufficient condition for the outcome of the magazine becoming the best-selling martial arts magazine. The logic in reaching the conclusion treats its absence as guaranteeing the opposite outcome—in other words, it treats it as the only sufficient condition, which would make it necessary.

Key Takeaway:
Errors in Reasoning questions that feature conditional logic will almost always have a conditional logic flaw. Harder ones will feature answer choices that bring this flaw up but applying it to the wrong connections. Make sure that you dig in and actually understand what term is being treated as necessary when it's actually sufficient (or vice versa) to avoid trap answers such as (A).