| Critical Reasoning Butler: March 2025 |
| March 2 | CR 1 | CR 2 |
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CR 1 Training manager: Any recruitment made at Brac Co. is temporary until the chairman has officially approved the recruitment. If the chairman judges that the provisional recruitment was based on insufficient qualifications, it is rejected. A hiring consultant
has observed that practically all provisional recruitments meet the benchmarks for sufficiency of qualification that the chairman verifies. Therefore, the consultant recommends that, because
the officer’s time spent gaining approval is largely unproductive, the process of seeking the chairman’s approval be done away with. The recommendation is risky and should not be accepted because there is no guarantee that the chairman’s standards will continue to be met once approval is no longer necessary.
The two portions in
boldface play which of the following roles?
(A) The first is a claim, whose accuracy the training manager disputes; the second is a conclusion drawn in support of the main conclusion of the argument made by the training manager.
(B) The first is a finding introduced in support of the main conclusion of the argument made by the training manager; the second is that main conclusion.
(C) The first is an observation disputed by the training manager; the second is a conclusion drawn from that observation.
(D) The first is a finding that was used to support a proposal opposed by the training manager; the second is a judgment that was based on that finding and in turn was used in support of the proposal.
(E) The first is a conclusion, the evidence for which is evaluated by the training manager; the second is part of the evidence that is cited in favor of that conclusion.
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CR 2 Twenty years ago, 30,000 young residents of Springfield were asked to rank the following priorities of the city government—bringing down the average rent, improving public health, improving road safety, and expanding public transportation—in order of how the priorities affected the residents. Recently, a follow-up to this survey indicated that a majority of those same people rank bringing down the average rent lower on the list now than they did twenty years ago. However, the majority of respondents also agree that the rents in most parts of the city have grown much faster than those in other neighboring cities over the past twenty years.
Which of the following, if true, helps to explain the apparent discrepancy?
A. Most who participated in the follow-up survey have become homeowners in the last twenty years.
B. Many of the governmental priorities that matter the most to people are not featured as categories on either survey.
C. Twenty years ago, some of the people surveyed paid rents similar to those paid by many others.
D. At the time of the recent survey, some of the people surveyed said they did not consider bringing down the average rent a priority.
E. Many who responded to the follow-up survey claim that they find the city’s roads much safer now than they did twenty years ago.