In the past five years, Peak Production's profits from recorded music

This problems gives us a great opportunity to discuss one particular approach to these two boldface questions. Keep in mind there are several good approaches here, this is just one that happens to be very quick when it works. Just ask yourself: "Fact or Claim?"

Furthermore, if you find a claim, you should act whether that claim is in fact the conclusion of the argument.

The first bold here is clearly a fact (summarizing what has already happened), whereas the second is a claim (it makes a prediction about the future). In fact, the second statement is actually the conclusion of whole argument.

Now let's run through the choices with this in mind:

(A) is wrong because it says (2) is "evidence" (i.e. a FACT).
(B) is in still, because "presents a problem" would fit with FACT and "the judgement" would fit with CLAIM. Also, "the judgement reached" sounds a lot like "conclusion" to me.
(C) is wrong because a "position" is a CLAIM, not a FACT.
(D) is wrong, because the language here would suggest that the second is not in fact the main conclusion, which it is.
(E) is wrong. Same problem as (D).

So (B) is correct!

There are often other things we need to consider on these problems. And clearly we have *vastly* over-simplified the argument by boiling it down to

• Statement 1 = "fact" and Statement 2 = "claim, which happens to be the conclusion"

... But, if it gets the job done!!

Cheers,
Mark