People with serious financial problems are so worried about money that

Hello, jct512. I will post my thoughts on each choice in hopes that they may help the community at large, answering your query in the process. How about we start with the prompt, as I often do when tackling CR questions:


You have to be careful not to take license and assume away when you see a word such as inferred. There is a very strict logic that must be adhered to, and we will get to that in a moment.


Note that the frame of the passage is people with serious financial problems, and every instance of their in the passage refers back to these people, so we will expect to see this subgroup in the correct answer choice. The linear logic of the passage is as follows:

- People of group A are so worried about money that conclusion A, they cannot be happy.
- Conclusion A leads to conclusion B, that everyone close to them... [is] unhappy as well.
- Condition A, only if their financial problems are solved leads to conclusion C, can they and those around them be happy.

Notice that conclusion C is not a guarantee. It is only saying that the group of people who are worried about money, and, by extension, their close ones, can be happy on the condition that their, the same one throughout the passage, financial problems are solved. Now take a look at each answer choice, assessing it for exactly what it says.


Analysis: We are not even talking about financial problems here, just serious problems in general. The frame of the passage is concerned with a subgroup of people specifically faced with serious financial problems, so we cannot speculate on any other broad category of issues. Red light.


Analysis: This one can appear to answer the question, but we have already addressed its fatal flaw: it sounds as if these people are guaranteed happiness in will be, and that just is not so. The difference between the can be of the passage and the will be of this answer choice is subtle, but one, the former, opens a door of possibility, while the other, the latter, closes it and seals the deal. Red light.


Analysis: This option starts out on shaky ground by addressing a group of people the passage does not even mention, those without serious financial problems, so anything we would think to add to the dialogue would be outside the scope of the information presented, certainly not an inference we could draw based on what is said about a different group. Notice, too, the same problem in will be that we discussed in the last answer choice. We are not interested in guarantees, since the passage does not make any about being happy. Red light.


Analysis: A classic reversal of logic, what is known as the converse of the original conditional statement. The first line of the passage states that if A--people have serious financial problems--then B--they cannot be happy. This answer choice says instead that if B, then A. It does not make sense to generalize that just because people, any group of people, are unhappy, they must be facing serious financial problems. As Donnie Darko might (amusingly) say, "There are other things that need to be taken into account here, like the whole spectrum of human emotion." In short, people can be unhappy for any of a number of reasons. Red light.


Analysis: Notice that the topic sentence of the passage states that people with serious financial problems... cannot be happy. If facing serious financial problems precludes people from being happy, then you can infer that happy people must not have serious financial problems. The group in question is mentioned, and they are mentioned in a logically sound conditional statement. Green light.

I hope that helps. If anyone has further questions, feel free to ask. Good luck with your studies.

- Andrew