varotkorn wrote:
Dear
VeritasKarishma VeritasPrepBrian AnthonyRitz,
Q2. How does choice A.
undermine the conclusion?
The official solution in the book says:
Answer choice "A" actually undermines the conclusion. I don't get the logic behind it.
Thank you in advance!
Varotkorn,
I can't speak to what the solution in the official book says (I didn't write it and don't have it in front of me at this moment), but here's my take:
The conclusion is about why decaffeinated coffee has a higher retail price. If processing regular coffee costs more than processing decaffeinated coffee, then it seems even less likely that the cost of providing decaffeinated coffee can explain its higher price -- after all, one part of providing coffee is processing it, and we just found out that the processing actually costs more for regular coffee, and therefore that this *part* of the cost of providing coffee is definitely not leading to the higher price for decaffeinated coffee.
The conclusion is "the price difference cannot be accounted for by the greater cost of providing decaffeinated coffee to consumer." So A is a slight strengthener if true. But this doesn't actually matter...
Because the right answer to an assumption question is neither something that strengthens nor something that weakens. It's something that's *necessary.* And to know if something is truly necessary, you have to try to live without it. What happens then? If you try to live without it and you die, then, whoops, I guess it was necessary. So in assumption questions, like this one, we have to negate an answer to check it.
Now, if you negate A, then "Processing regular coffee does not cost more than processing decaffeinated coffee." But of course we know that processing decaffeinated coffee is cheap, so this is maybe a slight weakener but mostly just kind of a wash -- the processing is cheap either way, and the processing therefore can't be the source of the "considerably higher" cost of decaffeinated coffee... but we already knew that. So negating this answer doesn't really add much of anything and certainly doesn't destroy the conclusion that "the price difference cannot be accounted for by the greater cost of providing decaffeinated coffee to consumer." Since A isn't necessary, it's wrong.
Does that make sense?
The real thing to focus on here, in my view, is the wording gap. They switched, you see, from talking about the cost of "the process of decaffeinating" coffee in the premise to the cost of "providing" the coffee in the conclusion. Could there be more to the cost of "providing" decaffeinated coffee than just the cost of "decaffeinating" it? That's what we're looking for, and, frankly, A just doesn't provide this.
But E *does* provide this. If getting the beans needed for decaffeinated coffee costs more in the first place (and this is certainly part of "providing" decaffeinated coffee), then it seems like the cost of providing decaffeinated coffee *does* account for the higher retail price of decaffeinated coffee, after all. Negating E has destroyed my conclusion that the cost of providing is not the cause. So E is necessary, and thus E is correct.
I hope this helps!
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Anthony RitzDirector of Test Prep
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