More than 80% of the executives in the county attended high school in

Hi Mike, I have to say that set aside Official Guide / GmatPrep question your questions are by far the best. They are clear, precise and usually there is no doubt between answers possible. Much better than those of e.g. EconomistGmat.

HI,

I would like to answer this question like this.
Weaken Question. Find the assumption and check if the possibility of that leading to result can be falsified.
Here the assumption is these exec are bright and the schools pops out bright students.

this is assumption . Any possibility to falsify the conclusion trough this assumption is the answer

To deal with such assumption questions, ones really need to comprehend what is going on in the argument. Once test takers grasp the idea that the author wants to say, they can easily eliminate option choices that are not really concerned with the heart matter of the argument.
" represent some of the brightest in the county." is the key word.

MAGOOSH Official Explanation:

The conclusion is that the county executives, at least the 80% who went to high schools in the county, are among the brightest in the county. We want a statement that will attack or weaken this conclusion.

The credited answer is choice (C), which points out an assumption without basis. Let's use the Negation test. Suppose those county executives were not above-average: suppose in fact they were among the lowest performing students at their schools. Even though three schools were very impressive, being at the bottom of the class at them is not necessarily so impressive. Therefore, if the negation of this statement is true, it devastates the argument, which indicates that the statement is indeed an assumption of the argument, and of course the prompt gives no justification for assuming this assumption is true. This is a potent criticism of the argument.

It's true that the argument does not address the salary difference between government jobs and the private sector, but even if the best private sector jobs pay far more that do government jobs (as they probably do!), that doesn't necessarily mean the most talented people will pursue those the private sector jobs over the government jobs. This does not necessarily constitute any objection to the argument. Choice (A) is incorrect.

The argument says nothing about how effectively these county executives are governing the county. The argument is only making a claim about their intelligence, no more. Therefore, any relationship between academic intelligence and the ability to govern effectively is irrelevant to this argument. Choice (B) is incorrect.

Where the county executives now work has no bearing on where they went to school as teenagers. Adults sometimes move away from hometowns when they get jobs: that's a quite common phenomenon. Choice (D) is incorrect.

The county executives went to the three top-scoring high schools. The fact that there's a fourth almost-as-good high school, which no county executive attended, has no implications whatsoever on the talent of the these county executives who attended the first three schools. Choice (E) is incorrect.

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