PrepTest 154

Correct. Argument or Facts:
Argument

Valid or Flawed:
Valid

Question Type:
Main Point

Stimulus Summary:
The public's tastes can undermine the public's welfare. Journalists prefer stories their audiences are interested in. So, since the audience is more interested in sensational gossip and conspiracies than important but boring news, newspapers often skip covering big political and social news in favor of the latest sensational rumors.

Answer Anticipation:
As is common in Main Point questions, the author tells us what they're setting out to prove, then supports it. The public's tastes can hurt public welfare, because (insert explanation). The conclusion is right there in the first sentence.

Answer Explanation:
Yep, right up front. Sometimes students miss questions like this just because an (A) answer that immediately matches your anticipation feels too good to be true. This one is just good enough to be true; it's an accurate paraphrase of the first sentence, which is the declared conclusion that the argument goes on to support.

Key Takeaway:
Some students hesitate to name the first sentence of a stimulus as its main point. If you're in that habit, break it immediately! It's just as common for the conclusion to appear first as last. The order of sentences in the stimulus doesn't affect which one of them is the conclusion. Try it yourself if you want: read the sentences out of order here. The conclusion is the same.

Incorrect. This supports the first sentence of the argument, so it can't be the main point. Main conclusions never support anything else.

Incorrect. This is a subsidiary conclusion, again supporting the first sentence. It does receive support from a premise, but it also supports the primary conclusion.

Incorrect. That's a little too broad. We don't know that readers are to blame for, say, failures of fact-checking or offensive advertising. We just know the public causes sensational stories to displace important ones. Not a correct paraphrase of any part of the argument.

Incorrect. This sounds like a good idea, but it's not contained in the argument at all, so it couldn't possibly be the argument's conclusion.