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805+ (Hard)|   Weaken|      
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Sajjad1994
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Government deregulation of the long-distance telephone business has re 26 Feb 2017, 03:34
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C
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Difficulty:

95% (hard)

Question Stats:

39% (02:00) correct 61% (02:08) wrong based on 202 sessions

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Government deregulation of the long-distance telephone business has resulted in increased competition among telephone carriers, thus resulting in lower prices for consumers. This process, however, will ultimately result in lower-quality service for consumers, because as the telephone carriers drop their prices to compete with one another for customers, they will be forced to cut corners on nonessential items like customer service.

Which of the following, if true, casts the most doubt on the argument that government deregulation of the telephone business will result in lower-quality customer service?

A. Technological advances have decreased the cost of providing long-distance telephone service to less than one-half of its cost prior to deregulation.

B. In a customer survey regarding the electric utility business, another industry that recently went through deregulation, surveyors found that customer dissatisfaction with service was 30 percent higher than prior to deregulation.

C. Customers have listed poor customer service as their number one reason for switching from one long-distance telephone service provider to another.

D. Some companies have decreased the cost of customer service by installing automated telephone response systems that eliminate the need for expensive live employees.

E. The greatest competition for long-distance telephone service providers will come not from traditional telephone companies, but from cellular telephone service providers.

Source: McGraw-Hill's GMAT
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C
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Government deregulation of the long-distance telephone business has re 26 Feb 2017, 07:52
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SajjadAhmad
Source: McGraw Hill GMAT

Government deregulation of the long-distance telephone business has resulted in increased competition among telephone carriers, thus resulting in lower prices for consumers. This process, however, will ultimately result in lower-quality service for consumers, because as the telephone carriers drop their prices to compete with one another for customers, they will be forced to cut corners on nonessential items like customer service.

Which of the following, if true, casts the most doubt on the argument that government deregulation of the telephone business will result in lower-quality customer service?

A. Technological advances have decreased the cost of providing long-distance telephone service to less than one-half of its cost prior to deregulation.
B. In a customer survey regarding the electric utility business, another industry that recently went through deregulation, surveyors found that customer dissatisfaction with service was 30 percent higher than prior to deregulation.
C. Customers have listed poor customer service as their number one reason for switching from one long-distance telephone service provider to another.
D. Some companies have decreased the cost of customer service by installing automated telephone response systems that eliminate the need for expensive live employees.
E. The greatest competition for long-distance telephone service providers will come not from traditional telephone companies, but from cellular telephone service providers.
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This is a good question.
Conclusion - will ultimately result in lower-quality service for consumers .
In order to weaken we need to prove that the service wont diminish because of deregulation.
Only C supports this .
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Government deregulation of the long-distance telephone business has re 27 Feb 2017, 12:35
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SajjadAhmad
Source: McGraw Hill GMAT

Government deregulation of the long-distance telephone business has resulted in increased competition among telephone carriers, thus resulting in lower prices for consumers. This process, however, will ultimately result in lower-quality service for consumers, because as the telephone carriers drop their prices to compete with one another for customers, they will be forced to cut corners on nonessential items like customer service.

Which of the following, if true, casts the most doubt on the argument that government deregulation of the telephone business will result in lower-quality customer service?

A. Technological advances have decreased the cost of providing long-distance telephone service to less than one-half of its cost prior to deregulation.
B. In a customer survey regarding the electric utility business, another industry that recently went through deregulation, surveyors found that customer dissatisfaction with service was 30 percent higher than prior to deregulation.
C. Customers have listed poor customer service as their number one reason for switching from one long-distance telephone service provider to another.
D. Some companies have decreased the cost of customer service by installing automated telephone response systems that eliminate the need for expensive live employees.
E. The greatest competition for long-distance telephone service providers will come not from traditional telephone companies, but from cellular telephone service providers.
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C states that the Customers are already facing this problem, which means it already lacks quality.
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Government deregulation of the long-distance telephone business has re 27 Feb 2017, 21:03
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SajjadAhmad
Source: McGraw Hill GMAT

Government deregulation of the long-distance telephone business has resulted in increased competition among telephone carriers, thus resulting in lower prices for consumers. This process, however, will ultimately result in lower-quality service for consumers, because as the telephone carriers drop their prices to compete with one another for customers, they will be forced to cut corners on nonessential items like customer service.

Which of the following, if true, casts the most doubt on the argument that government deregulation of the telephone business will result in lower-quality customer service?

A. Technological advances have decreased the cost of providing long-distance telephone service to less than one-half of its cost prior to deregulation.
B. In a customer survey regarding the electric utility business, another industry that recently went through deregulation, surveyors found that customer dissatisfaction with service was 30 percent higher than prior to deregulation.
C. Customers have listed poor customer service as their number one reason for switching from one long-distance telephone service provider to another.
D. Some companies have decreased the cost of customer service by installing automated telephone response systems that eliminate the need for expensive live employees.
E. The greatest competition for long-distance telephone service providers will come not from traditional telephone companies, but from cellular telephone service providers.
Show more


The primary assumption is that is more competition results in less quality.

If we show the above relation as reverse then it would help us to weaken the assumption.

A. This has no effect on the above relation.
B. In fact this strengthens.
C. This is the best answer. Observe that customers cited the number one reason to switch to other vendor is because of poor service. If customer is switching from one to another means that new company will give the service better. This shows the reverse relation for our assumption.
D. This doesn't effect on the relation.
E. Irrelavent.
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Government deregulation of the long-distance telephone business has re 27 Feb 2017, 23:05
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option C should be the right answer as it states that customer already facing the lower quality problem and they are switching to other network for better quality customer services then it weakness the stimulus ,because competition has raised so there must be other telephone providers that give better quality customer services .
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Government deregulation of the long-distance telephone business has re 28 Feb 2017, 15:09
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Government deregulation of the long-distance telephone business has resulted in increased competition among telephone carriers, thus resulting in lower prices for consumers. This process, however, will ultimately result in lower-quality service for consumers, because as the telephone carriers drop their prices to compete with one another for customers, they will be forced to cut corners on nonessential items like customer service.

Which of the following, if true, casts the most doubt on the argument that government deregulation of the telephone business will result in lower-quality customer service?

A. Technological advances have decreased the cost of providing long-distance telephone service to less than one-half of its cost prior to deregulation.
B. In a customer survey regarding the electric utility business, another industry that recently went through deregulation, surveyors found that customer dissatisfaction with service was 30 percent higher than prior to deregulation.
C. Customers have listed poor customer service as their number one reason for switching from one long-distance telephone service provider to another.
D. Some companies have decreased the cost of customer service by installing automated telephone response systems that eliminate the need for expensive live employees.
E. The greatest competition for long-distance telephone service providers will come not from traditional telephone companies, but from cellular telephone service providers.





The prethinking for this question is that to weaken the argument we find a reason why the customers would prefer one telephone company over the other as the prices are already low and competitive...what that may be..customer quality which is also mentioned in the argument. if a point mentiones that customer prefer quality over price then the argument would be weakend because in that case the telephone companies would have to focus on providing better customer service to retain their customers.

Option C is clearly doing the point that i mentioned above. C is correct weakener.

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Government deregulation of the long-distance telephone business has re 19 Apr 2021, 07:41
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Official Explanation

Answer C directly challenges the assumption made in the passage that market forces will drive telephone companies to cut corners on customer service in order to cut costs, because C implies that market forces will give these companies at least as much of an incentive to improve customer service as to cut costs. None of the other answers challenge this assumption. The cost savings mentioned in A and D do not actually give the companies any incentive to devote more resources to customer service.

ANSWER: C
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Government deregulation of the long-distance telephone business has re 19 Apr 2021, 08:00
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I chose D. I saw the difficulty of the question was 95% and said that what seems to be the right choice will never the the right choice. C is too easy a choice for a question of this supposed difficulty and so I chose D.

I'll show myself out.
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