Critical Reasoning

In the United States, the Postal Service has a monopoly on first-class mail, but much of what is sent first class could be transmitted electronically. Electronic transmittal operators argue that if the Postal Service were to offer electronic transmission, it would have an unfair advantage, since its electronic transmission service could be subsidized from the profits of the monopoly. Which of the following questions can be answered on the basis of the information in the passage above?

Banning cigarette advertisements in the mass media will not reduce the number of young people who smoke. They know that cigarettes exist and they know how to get them. They do not need the advertisements to supply that information. The above argument would be most weakened if which of the following were true?

Mr. Lawson: We should adopt a national family policy that includes legislation requiring employers to provide paid parental leave and establishing government-sponsored day care. Such laws would decrease the stress levels of employees who have responsibility for small children. Thus, such laws would lead to happier, better-adjusted families. Which of the following, if true, would most strengthen the conclusion above?

Sales taxes tend to be regressive, affecting poor people more severely than wealthy people. When all purchases of consumer goods are taxed at a fixed percentage of the purchase price, poor people pay a larger proportion of their income in sales taxes than wealthy people do. It can be correctly inferred on the basis of the statements above that which of the following is true?

Blood banks will shortly start to screen all donors for NANB hepatitis. Although the new screening tests are estimated to disqualify up to 5 percent of all prospective blood donors, they will still miss two-thirds of donors carrying NANB hepatitis. Therefore, about 10 percent of actual donors will still supply NANB-contaminated blood. Which of the following inferences about the consequences of instituting the new tests is best supported by the passage above?

Millions of identical copies of a plant can be produced using new tissue-culture and cloning techniques. If plant propagation by such methods in laboratories proves economical, each of the following, if true, represents a benefit of the new techniques to farmers EXCEPT:

In the past, teachers, bank tellers, and secretaries were predominantly men; these occupations slipped in pay and status when they became largely occupied by women. Therefore, if women become the majority in currently male-dominated professions like accounting, law, and medicine, the income and prestige of these professions will also drop. Which of the following, if true, would most likely be part of the evidence used to refute the conclusion above?

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?

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. Some observers have concluded that the rise in the price of pepper means that the switch by some growers from pepper to cocoa left those growers no better off than if none of them had switched; this conclusion, however, is unwarranted because it can be inferred to be likely that

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?

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?

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______

Using computer techniques, researchers analyze layers of paint that lie buried beneath the surface layers of old paintings. They claim, for example, that additional mountainous scenery once appeared in Leonardo da Vinci�s Mona Lisa, which was later painted over. Skeptics reply to these claims, however, that X-ray examinations of the Mona Lisa do not show hidden mountains. Which of the following, if true, would tend most to weaken the force of the skeptics� objections?

Archaeologists seeking the location of a legendary siege and destruction of a city are excavating in several possible places, including a middle and a lower layer of a large mound. The bottom of the middle layer contains some pieces of pottery of type 3, known to be from a later period than the time of the destruction of the city, but the lower layer does not. The force of the evidence cited above is most seriously weakened if which of the following is true?

Archaeologists seeking the location of a legendary siege and destruction of a city are excavating in several possible places, including a middle and a lower layer of a large mound. The bottom of the middle layer contains some pieces of pottery of type 3, known to be from a later period than the time of the destruction of the city, but the lower layer does not. Which of the following hypotheses is best supported by the evidence above?

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?

Nearly 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?

In Millington, a city of 50,000 people, Mercedes Pedrosa, a realtor, calculated that a family with Millington�s median family income, $28,000ayear,couldaffordtobuyMillington�smedian-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?