| Critical Reasoning Butler: August 2026 |
| August 5 | CR 1 | CR 2 |
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CR 1 A successful clothing department store, in a central downtown location of a certain city, is of a limited size and has grown so much over the past year that it needs to expand. There are a few other slightly larger available retails lots in the downtown regions for sale, but the prices per square foot are quite high. The management finds that cost per square foot of lots in a suburb a few miles from downtown is almost half of that in the downtown region, so they plan to relocate there to save costs.
Which of the following, if true, most seriously undermines this plan?
A) The store will have to adapt to the building codes of the suburb, which may not be the same as the city.
B) The lot for the suburb location will require a sprawling parking lot.
C) Consumers from the city who do not own cars will have to pay bus fare to commute to this store now.
D) Almost all of the store's other locations, in other metropolitan regions throughout the state, are in downtown areas; very few are in suburbs.
E) Some of the available downtown locations, though only a few blocks away, would be closest to entirely different bus and subway lines.
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CR 2 Mountain County and Sunrise County are two comparable counties, with similar numbers of registered voters. Both are in the same region of the state. In both counties, about 60% of the registered voters are registered Republicans, and almost all others are registered Democrats. In 2005, Republican candidate Alf Landon ran for supervisor of Mountain County, and Republican candidate Thomas Dewey ran for supervisor of Sunrise County. Both took similar stands on issues, and both ran against conservative Democratic candidates in the general county-wide election, and none of these four candidates was an incumbent at the time of this election. The Republican Congressman representing Sunrise County endorsed Mr. Dewey, but the Republican Congressman representing Mountain County refrained from endorsing Mr. Landon. Mr. Dewey won his election, but Mr. Landon lost his election. Clearly, the endorsement positions of the respective Congressmen were the deciding factors in these elections.
In evaluating the argument, it would be most useful to know which of the following?
(A) How these two counties have voted in US Congressional and US Presidential elections over the past decade
(B) What stands Mr. Landon and Mr. Dewey took on issues considered most important by registered Democrat voters
(C) How well Congressmen, involved primarily in national politics, are informed of the details of local politics within a single county.
(D) How typical it has been throughout the state, in the past decade, for a Congressman to endorse a county supervisor candidate running in his Congressional district.
(E) How many voters in each of these two counties were aware of their respective Congressman's endorsement positions.
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04 Aug 2026, 10:42
