If the price it pays for coffee beans continues to increase, the Coffe

Hello, Soumik28. I enjoy providing an Expert response when no other such response has been offered, and I enjoyed working on this question, so I hope that by sharing my thoughts, I will help you as well as the larger community. When it comes to CR questions, I like to start with the question itself so that I can interpret the information in the passage through a certain lens as I go.


Our task is to supply the next link in a chain of logic. In general, CR questions ask us to do this anyway. You have to be careful to stick to the exact phrasing of the passage, as well as the arrow of logic laid out, or you can quickly go wayward and end up downing way more time than you should to arrive at a guess. So what is this particular chain of logic?


Sentence 1 provides a conditional statement: if A, then B. Event A is the price of coffee beans increasing; the result, event B, is a price increase at the Coffee Shoppe.

Sentence 2 launches into the next conditional statement, but this one branches at the end: if B, then C or D. Notice that we are not starting with a separate condition here. In that case carries over the result from the previous sentence. If the Coffee Shoppe increases its prices, then one of two outcomes will result: event C, the business will shift into selling noncoffee products; or event D, the business will continue selling coffee, but its coffee sales will decrease. Notice that in either case, the passage tells us what will (not may) happen. These are definite outcomes if event B is triggered.

Sentence 3 follows up on event C, providing yet another conditional statement: if C, then E. Selling noncoffee products will decrease overall profitability, plain and simple.

Sentence 4 negates event D in a reversed conditional statement: if not D, then not F. That is, if coffee sales do not decrease, then the business will not experience a decrease in overall profitability. The double negatives may take a moment to sort out, but you will notice that we now have two pieces of information that tell us about the overall profitability of the Coffee Shoppe. (If you were wondering why I labeled the final outcome as event F, rather than the earlier E, it is because E is a direct result of C, while F is not.)

Our answer must fit with the chain of logic that we can map out in the following manner:

If A → B
If B → C or D
If C → E
If D → F (notice the strikethroughs)


This is a reversal from the passage. We know that overall profitability can decrease in one of two ways: 1) selling noncoffee products (event C); or 2) decreasing coffee sales (via D and F). You will notice that neither case mentions coffee beans. Event A serves as a catalyst for a negative outcome—raising prices—but we cannot say for certain that just because overall profitability decreases, it must be true that the price of coffee beans has continued to rise. It could be true that the Coffee Shoppe is not selling as much coffee as usual, regardless of the price it pays for beans. Red light.


Remember, the entire chain of logic presented in the passage relies upon increasing the price of the products the Coffee Shoppe offers to customers (event B). It is that event that leads to events C or D. By removing that crucial link in B, we have broken our chain. Although tempting at first glance, this answer choice has a glaring omission. Red light.


This is the very missing link in question from the previous answer, and we can be glad that we took note of the language used in the passage with all those instances of will. The outcome is guaranteed by the passage if event B occurs. Again, either the business will resort to hawking noncoffee products (event C), a dead-in-the-water proposition (that ends in event E), or the Coffee Shoppe will sell less coffee (event D), the lifeblood of, well, the coffee shop, per the final line of the passage. In short, the Coffee Shoppe must sell coffee to avoid a decrease in overall profitability. This is our answer. Green light.


We can only speculate on what could happen to the price of coffee beans, since the arrow of logic points away from that condition from the start. There is no need to read beyond cannot decrease here, as nothing from the passage can be used to back up such a statement. Pure speculation does not deliver on what the question is asking us to do. Red light.


There is no condition in the passage under which we are told that coffee sales will increase. We are only informed as to what will cause a decrease. If you negate the last line from only if its coffee sales do not decrease to only if its coffee sales increase, then that is a logical misstep. For all we know, do not decrease could refer to breaking even, making the same number of sales, with no increase at all. Stick to what the passage says. Red light.

I hope that helps clarify the question and answer choices. One final note: this is an official LSAT question, and those tend to be a little more nuanced than their GMAT™ counterparts. I would not recommend studying too many of these questions over others that will more likely be on the test you are planning to take. Learn what you can from such questions, but always center your studies on official GMAT™ questions. Like produces like.

Good luck with your preparation.

- Andrew