Logical reasoning PrepTest 141 · Section 4 · Question 22

Incorrect. Since the stimulus establishes that milk sales have gone up more than yogurt sales, this answer makes the paradox even more peculiar in that milk sales must really be up, despite the lower influence on consumer preferences ads have in that space.

Incorrect. Without knowing how large this group is, or any recent shift away from those who go with the intent of purchasing yogurt to this group, there's no way to know if this resolves the paradox. Even if we did know that, we still wouldn't know why this shift happened.

Incorrect. Even if the shoppers started by being more likely to buy the store brand, there's no information here about why, after the ads aired, there was a larger swing in milk than in yogurt given the expected larger impact on yogurt preferences. Why did more people who didn't buy the store milk brand before make the shift compared to the people shifting to the store yogurt brand?

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Facts

Question Type:
Paradox

Stimulus Summary:
Ads influence preferences on yogurt more than milk, but a company advertising its store-brand products saw a larger increase in sales of milk rather than yogurt.

Answer Anticipation:
Accepting that ads have a larger impact on yogurt preferences than milk preferences, there must be something else going on to explain this discrepancy in sales. Either something is driving milk sales up outside of the ad, or something is driving yogurt sales down outside of the ad. Any answer that suggests this is the case, or a reason for it, will resolve this paradox.

Answer Explanation:
If yogurt has recently gone out of style, or there's some reason that people are ignoring it, then that would explain why the ads coincided with more milk sales than yogurt sales. It's not that milk sales are up a peculiar amount because of the ad—it's that yogurt sales are down for some reason unrelated to the ad.

Key Takeaway:
Changes always need to be measured against a baseline. Here, the sales of yogurt and milk were compared against each other, not against the baseline yogurt and milk sales. This is a similar issue to the one seen in many arguments that conclude one thing doesn't cause another—mainly, that the change isn't measured against what would have happened otherwise.

Incorrect. While this answer might explain why ads generally don't change milk preferences as much as yogurt, it certainly doesn't explain why the most recent ad coincided with a relative surge in milk sales—if anything, it makes the paradox worse!