Bunuel
Restaurateur: If San Francisco wants to retain its thriving restaurant industry, then we must defeat the newly proposed increase in the city dining tax. In cities across the country that have enacted a similarly high tax, within three years nearly 35% of all restaurants have gone out of business.
To better evaluate the argument above, it would be most useful to answer which of the following questions?
A. How would San Francisco’s new dining tax compare to other cities across the country?
B. Is price the most important factor for potential customers in determining where they will choose to dine?
C. What percentage of restaurants typically go out of business over a three-year period in cities without a similarly high dining tax?
D. How many restaurants are in San Francisco compared to other cities across the country?
E. Does the new city tax apply to restaurants that have been in business for more than 25 years?
VERITAS PREP OFFICIAL SOLUTION:
In any useful to evaluate question, you should attack the argument and consider what flaws or assumptions exist. Here the primary assumption is that 35% of restaurants going out of business is a higher than normal figure. What if it is generally true that about a third of restaurants go out of business in a three-year period? Then this argument would be quite weak. The argument suggests that a high dining tax has caused a higher than average closing rate in other cities, but no evidence is given that 35% is actually a high figure. Given that, answer choice C indicates the question you would want to know the answer to in order to better evaluate the quality of the argument.
For (A), this comparison is unimportant as you are already given the necessary comparison in the stimulus – you know that other cities have a similarly high tax rate and the issue is only whether 35% is really significant. For (B), price does not need to be the MOST important factor within this argument. The argument suggests that higher prices caused by a higher tax would cause restaurants to go out of business, but this does not require that price be the most important factor for customers. For (D), with percentage data used in the stimulus, the number of restaurants in other cities compared to San Francisco is irrelevant. For (E), whether there may or may not be certain restaurants that are exempt from the tax has no meaningful impact on the quality of the argument.
The correct answer is (C).