LR Question 22 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Company president: Most of our best sales…
QUESTION TYPE: Weaken
CONCLUSION: We should hire engineers who have no sales experience.
REASONING: Many of our best salespeople were engineers with no sales experience.
ANALYSIS: We need to know more about the group the company hired.
If the company hired many experienced salespeople, then it’s surprising that engineers with no experience make the best salespeople.
But if the company mostly hired engineers with no sales experience, then it’s not surprising they are some of the best salespeople.
Take a big enough group of unqualified people and some are bound to do alright.
___________
- Totally irrelevant. We only care what characteristics people had when they were hired.
- CORRECT. If this is true, it’s not surprising that engineers with no experience were the best performers. They were the largest group.
- This might explain why engineers do well. It strengthens the argument.
- This strengthens the argument. If most applicants are not engineers, then it’s surprising that engineers are the most successful.
- Answers with ‘some’ are very vague. This could be 2 out of 10,000 salespeople. That doesn’t tell us much. It could still be the case that most people with no experience do better.
More Resources for Weaken Questions
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Weaken questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers weaken questions.
on the answer key it says that answer D is the correct answer so I’m confused with your explanation
What in particular about the explanation are you confused by? Do you mind checking your answer key again, I’m pretty sure that B is the correct answer and it is corroborated by my answer key.
I’m confused on this one. We are supposed to choose the answer that weakens the president’s argument. His argument is that their best sales representatives have a degree in engineering with little or no sales experience, so he says they should hire sales representatives who have engineering degrees with little or no sales experience.
To me, it seems the answer you provide actually strengthens his argument. Answer B says that most of the people hired as sales representatives had a degree in engineering but no sales experience… isn’t that agreeing with what he says?
I could be looking at this completely wrong though, so further explanation would be very helpful!
Thanks
“Most of our best representatives” doesn’t equal “most of our representatives are engineers”
The president was trying to say that out of a diverse pool, the engineers were best. But answer B shows that the pool is mostly engineers. So of course they’re the best!
If you only hired people who were left-handed, then your best sales people would be lefthanded. That doesn’t mean you are correct to only hire left handed people.