Hello, everyone. Since no one has yet posted a solution to the question, I will offer my thoughts. Note that similar reasoning questions do not pop up frequently on the GMAT™. But they are fair game, and understanding the logical underpinnings is a skill to develop for any type of CR question.
Quote:
The editor of a magazine has pointed out several errors of spelling and grammar committed on a recent TV program. But she can hardly be trusted to pass judgment on such matters: similar errors have been found in her own magazine.
The flawed reasoning in the argument above is most similar to that in which one of the following?
The passage could not be more straightforward. The argument runs that
the editor of a magazine should not
be trusted to pass judgment on [errors of spelling and grammar committed on a recent TV program], since these same types of errors
have been found in her own magazine. If you prefer the premise to come first, we get something like
Because X, not Y, in which X and Y are held together by a common theme—in this case, errors. We want to find an answer choice that mimics this sort of relationship.
Quote:
(A) Your newspaper cannot be trusted with the prerogative to criticize the ethics of our company: you misspelled our president’s name.
Misspelling a name has nothing to do with ethics, unless the misspelling was something libelous. In more general terms, an error is not necessarily an ethical issue. I am guessing that this answer choice was designed to catch the person who latched onto the error theme in the passage and did not consider the actual reasoning in the argument.
Quote:
(B) Your news program cannot be trusted to judge our hiring practices as unfair: you yourselves unfairly discriminate in hiring and promotion decisions.
Check against the passage:
- cannot be trusted √
- common theme—here, unfair hiring practices √
This looks pretty good. Note that similar
reasoning does not have to mean similar
circumstances. The passage deals with errors, the answer choice with hiring practices, but the reasoning is similar, fitting into the same
Because X, not Y shell I mentioned above.
Quote:
(C) Your regulatory agency cannot condemn our product as unsafe: selling it is allowed under an existing-product clause.
The two halves of the argument are mismatched again: safety and permissibility do not necessarily overlap. We would expect the part after the colon to have something to do with an unsafe product, not that a
regulatory agency would be likely to produce any kind of product.
Quote:
(D) Your coach cannot be trusted to judge our swimming practices: he accepted a lucrative promotional deal from a soft-drink company.
This answer choice takes more creative license to get to a point where it should even be considered. What
swimming has to do with accepting
a lucrative promotional deal, I have no clue. If the coach was not supposed to accept money from sponsors, then the deal could be seen as unethical, but even then, there is no reasonable association with swimming.
Quote:
(E) Your teen magazine should not run this feature on problems afflicting modern high schools: your revenue depends on not alienating the high school audience
I suppose that if the words
afflicting and
alienating prove difficult to comprehend, this answer choice could look feasible. But the argument makes no sense, unless we want to assume that
the high school audience in question would not want to read about
problems afflicting modern high schools. I would think high schoolers would be more interested in reading about issues that would potentially affect them. In any case, despite the fact that there is a common thread here in high school, the relationship between the two halves of the argument is unclear, not like what we see in the passage. Again, the argument in the passage is essentially,
Because her magazine contains errors, she should not be trusted to provide a criticism involving the same kinds of errors. It is hard to create a parallel sentence with the information in the answer choice above.
In the end, (B) stands alone as the one reasonable answer. A harder question might place the premise and argument in a different order or present more answer choices with paired elements X and Y, but with different relationships between them. But you have to take what you can get, especially when looking at LSAT Logical Reasoning questions. Count yourself lucky here.
- Andrew