tingle15 wrote:
Federal law prohibits businesses from reimbursing any employees for the cost of owning and operating a private aircraft that is used for business purposes. Thus, many American companies themselves purchase private aircraft. The vast majority of the business aviation fleet is owned by small and mid-size businesses, and flights are strictly for business purposes, with mostly mid-level employees on board. These companies and their boards of directors are in full compliance with the law and with what is best for their businesses.
Which of the following can be most properly inferred from the statements above?
E) By not receiving any reimbursement for these flights, the mid-level executives on board are complying with the law.
This question doesn't make any sense. The right answer is meant to be E, but there are only two sentences in the stem that discuss compliance with the law. The first is this one:
Federal law prohibits businesses from reimbursing any employees for the cost of owning and operating a private aircraft that is used for business purposes.which only describes what is illegal for businesses, and which is irrelevant regardless, because answer E is about flights on company planes, not about flights on employee-owned planes.
So if we can infer answer E, it must be from this sentence:
These companies and their boards of directors are in full compliance with the law But this only tells us that companies and high-level executives comply with the law. It tells us nothing about mid-level employees.
So there's nothing in the question that lets us infer anything about how law-abiding mid-level employees are. But then consider what E says:
E) By not receiving any reimbursement for these flights, the mid-level executives on board are complying with the law.How is this conceivably an inference? How could it be false, even without the passage? Are we imagining that in some countries the law might absolutely require employees to be reimbursed for company flights, and that in those countries employees would be breaking the law if they were not reimbursed? How is that even plausible? Of course employees who pay out of their own pocket aren't breaking the law. We don't need a passage of any kind to "infer" that. It's a bit like if an answer said "by not robbing a bank, Tina was complying with the law." Obviously that's true; it's not something you'd ever need a passage to infer, unless you imagine in some worlds the law requires people to rob banks.
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