imhimanshu wrote:
In North America there has been an explosion of public interest in, and enjoyment of,opera over the last three decades. The evidence of this explosion is that of the 70 or so professional opera companies currently active in North America,45 were founded over the course of the last 30 years.
The reasoning above assumes which one of the following?
(A) All of the 70 professional opera companies are commercially viable options.
(B) There were fewer than 45 professional opera companies that had been active 30 years ago and that ceased operations during the last 30 years.
(C) There has not been a corresponding increase in the number of professional companies devoted to other performing arts.
(D) The size of the average audience at performances by professional opera companies has increased over the past three decades.
(E) The 45 most recently founded companies were all established as a result of enthusiasm on the part of a potential audience.
Source : LSAT PrepTest February 1997, Q20
AnthonyRitzFrom Manhattan LSAT Instructor (Tommy Wallach) wrote:
This is an assumption question, so let's start by focusing on the core.
Conclusion: Explosion of interest in opera over last 30 years
Premise: Of the 70 active companies, 45 were founded in the last 30 years.
(A) Believe it or not, we don't need this. Many artistic operations make their money through donations and public support. They don't need to be commercially viable. However, (A) is also too extreme. The argument does not assume that all of them are viable, just enough to bear out the conclusion that interest is exploding.
(B) CORRECT. The problem with the argument is that even if 45 companies were founded recently, what if there were a thousand companies 40 years ago, and all of them died out, and 45 new ones came in? This tells us that there were fewer than 45 companies that closed in the past 30 years. This helps prove that 45 new ones opening up is greater than the number that closed.
(C) is totally out of scope. We only care about opera.
(D) doesn't actually help, because the average size could go up because most opera houses close. If 9 out of 10 opera houses close, even if audiences are up 50%, we've still lost audience.
(E) is never assumed. We don't need to know why they were founded, just that they were (and that they outnumbered the houses that closed).
EXPLANATION FROM KAPLAN
Assumptions link evidence and conclusion. Never forget that!In arguing that North American public interest in and enjoyment of opera has skyrocketed over the last three decades, the author points to the fact that 45 out of the 70 active professional opera companies were founded during that time. He must see a link between the companies’ founding and audience enthusiasm over that time period, but this answer may be hard to predict, so let’s just examine each choice in turn.
(A) Do all 70 have to be “commercially viable” for the argument to work? No, because commercial viability isn’t a term in the discussion. Some, or even many, of the companies may be having a rough time commercially right now, but they still could have been founded by way of 30 years’ worth of audience enthusiasm. Eliminate.
(B) This one speaks to the implied comparison between the last three decades and earlier years. Suppose, for the moment, that (B) is wrong: Suppose that 30 years ago there were exactly 45 professional opera companies that went bust at some point thereafter. If so, then over the last 30 years there’s been no net gain in the number of companies that could support the notion of greater audience enthusiasm for opera. (The defunct 45 would just have been supplanted by the new 45.) Indeed, if things were worse, if 46 or 48 or 50 or more vintage companies have gone belly-up, that would represent a net loss of North American opera in the decades when the author claims that opera’s popularity has exploded! No, for the argument’s arithmetic to support the conclusion about audiences, (B) has to be true as written; over the last three decades there have to have been fewer companies dying than were born.
That’s the necessary assumption, as shown by the Kaplan Denial Test. Of the remaining choices:
(C) Theater, orchestral music, and ballet are outside the scope.
(D) Larger audiences might be read as a sign of greater public interest in opera, but they’re not necessary for this argument to work, since this argument draws its conclusion from the number of new companies, not from their overall health.
(E) asserts that the 45 new companies were all founded on the potential audience’s enthusiasm. Not necessarily. Many if not all of them may have been founded simply on the performers’ and impresarios’ desires to create opera, in the hope (rather than the expectation) that audiences would be enthusiastic. (E)’s firm cause-and-effect isn’t an integral part of the author’s logic.
GMATNinja, Could you please share your thought on this question? What is the logic to resolve? It is too complicated. Why answer choice (E) is incorrect?