Critical Reasoning Problems Lesson 8
Q1–10 of 20Nearly one in three subscribers to Financial Forecaster is a millionaire, and over half are in top management. Shouldn’t you subscribe to Financial Forecaster now?
A reader who is neither a millionaire nor in top management would be most likely to act in accordance with the advertisement’s suggestion if he or she drew which of the following questionable conclusions invited by the advertisement?
Questions 2-3 are based on the following.
Contrary to the charges made by some of its opponents, the provisions of the new deficit-reduction law for indiscriminate cuts in the federal budget are justified. Opponents should remember that the New Deal pulled this country out of great economic troubles even though some of its programs were later found to be unconstitutional.
The author’s method of attacking the charges of certain opponents of the new deficit-reduction law is to
Questions 2-3 are based on the following.
Contrary to the charges made by some of its opponents, the provisions of the new deficit-reduction law for indiscriminate cuts in the federal budget are justified. Opponents should remember that the New Deal pulled this country out of great economic troubles even though some of its programs were later found to be unconstitutional.
The opponents could effectively defend their position against the author’s strategy by pointing out that
In Millington, a city of 50,000 people, Mercedes Pedrosa, a realtor, calculated that a family with Millington’s median
family income, $28,000 a year, could afford to buy Millington’s median-priced $77,000 house. This calculation was based on an
11.2 percent mortgage interest rate and on the realtor’s assumption that a family could only afford to pay up to 25 percent of its income for housing.
Which of the following corrections of a figure appearing in the passage above, if it were the only correction that needed to be made, would yield a new calculation showing that even incomes below the median family income would enable families in Millington to afford Millington’s median-priced house?
Psychological research indicates that college hockey and football players are more quickly moved to hostility and aggression than are college athletes in noncontact sports such as swimming. But the researchers’ conclusion—that contact sports encourage and teach participants to be hostile and aggressive—is untenable. The football and hockey players were probably more hostile and aggressive to start with than the swimmers.
Which of the following, if true, would most strengthen the conclusion drawn by the psychological researchers?
Ross: The profitability of Company X, restored to private ownership five years ago, is clear evidence that businesses will always fare better under private than under public ownership.
Julia: Wrong. A close look at the records shows that X has been profitable since the appointment of a first-class manager, which happened while X was still in the pubic sector.
Which of the following best describes the weak point in Ross’s claim on which Julia’s response focuses?
Stronger patent laws are needed to protect inventions from being pirated. With that protection, manufacturers would be encouraged to invest in the development of new products and technologies. Such investment frequently results in an increase in a manufacturer’s productivity.
Which of the following conclusions can most properly be drawn from the information above?
Which of the following best completes the passage below?
At large amusement parks, live shows are used very deliberately to influence crowd movements. Lunchtime performances relieve the pressure on a park’s restaurants. Evening performances have a rather different purpose: to encourage visitors to stay for supper. Behind this surface divergence in immediate purpose there is the unified underlying goal of______
James weighs more than Kelly.
Luis weighs more than Mark.
Mark weighs less than Ned.
Kelly and Ned are exactly the same weight.
If the information above is true, which of the following must also be true?
Questions 10-11 are based on the following.
Partly because of bad weather, but also partly because some major pepper growers have switched to high-priced cocoa, world production of pepper has been running well below worldwide sales for three years. Pepper is consequently in relatively short supply. The price of pepper has soared in response: it now equals that of cocoa.
Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?