Logical reasoning PrepTest 157 · Section 3 · Question 5

Question prompt

Taylorism, the early-twentieth-century industrial Remaining source text redacted.
Why the credited answer is right

Credited answer: B

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

Argument or Facts

Facts

Strategy Overview

Argument or facts? Always facts Determine which general idea the passage provides an example of Use anticipations to select the answer choice that describes the general idea the passage illustrates
Generally, the correct idea will need to be expressed in weak language

Answer Anticipation

This passage identifies two ways Taylorism affected workers from the early 1900s. On the one hand, Taylorism promoted efficiency and productivity, which increased workers' standards of living. On the other hand, these workers' jobs became way more boring, which robbed the jobs of some of their inherent value. From these effects, we can make a generalization. We'll just replace some of the specific nouns, like "Taylorism" and "standards of living," with more generic terms. We can say something like, "A movement can benefit people in one way and harm them in other ways." To be safe, we should make sure the language is weak and wiggly. After all, we only have one example to make this generalization from. We can't say what always or even usually happens. So, we should make sure the correct answer says "can," "sometimes," "might," or something like that.

Answer choices

  1. A
    Sometimes measures that appear Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice A is not credited

    This doesn't match our anticipation, so we can quickly eliminate it. After all, the passage doesn't say that Taylorism made workers in any way less productive. So, we don't have any evidence that measures that appear to promote efficiency are actually "deleterious" (harmful) to efficiency.

  2. B
    Some developments in industry Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice B matches the stem

    This answer choice that matches our anticipation. We anticipated that the correct answer would say something like, "A movement can benefit people in one way and harm them in other ways." This answer choice is a touch more specific than that anticipation, but it gets across the same basic idea. Moreover, it accurately describes what happened to workers following Taylorism. It benefited these workers financially (as they could enjoy a higher standard of living) while making their jobs less rewarding in other ways (since Taylorism made this work boring and robbed it of some of its intrinsic worth). Moreover, this answer choice uses the weak and wiggly language ("some," "can") we need for this question. Therefore, we can select (B) and give the remaining choices an at-most cursory review.

  3. C
    Increased efficiency in industrial Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice C is not credited

    This doesn't conform to our anticipation, so we'll toss it out. Moreover, the passage doesn't say that Taylorism led workers to decrease the effort they devoted to their jobs. The passage only says that their work became routine and repetitive. But a routine and repetitive task can still take a lot of time and effort to complete!

  4. D
    An increase in workers' Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice D is not credited

    This doesn't quite match our anticipation, so we can eliminate it. This answer choice is more boldly worded than what we anticipated. We can't validly conclude that increased living standards "will likely" decrease how much workers value their jobs. We know this happened in the early 1900s, but we don't know if this usually happens. For this reason, we can cross off (D).

  5. E
    Workers who have greater Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice E is not credited

    This doesn't match our anticipation, so we can cross it off. After all, the passage doesn't tell us anything about workers with "greater than average" or "average creativity and talent." The passage only says that Taylorism made jobs emphasize creativity and talent less. The passage doesn't tell us anything about the creativity and talent the workers possessed.

Question analytics

Based on historical answer selection rates for this question.

Answer choice distribution

  1. A 6%
  2. B Credited 79%
  3. C 4%
  4. D 10%
  5. E 1%

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