LR Question 4 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: One way to furnish a living room is with modular…
QUESTION TYPE: Paradox – Exception
FACTS: Modular furniture is more expensive than normal furniture. Modular furniture allows you to buy furniture by parts.
ANALYSIS: You’re not given much information about modular furniture. There’s no way to prephrase every wrong answer.
So before answering this type of question, just take a moment to open your mind to possible reasons modular furniture could be more expensive.
___________
- Mass production of regular furniture can lower costs.
- CORRECT. This doesn’t distinguish between normal sofas and modular sofas.
- Fashionable, trendy furniture will cost more.
- If you can’t ever get a discount on modular furniture, that will raise the average price you have to pay.
- If modular sofas are bigger, then more materials will be required to build them. Extra materials cost more. Maybe this is true for other modular furniture as well.
More Resources for Paradox Questions
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Paradox questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers paradox questions.
I get that B speaks to raising the prices of all sofas, standard and modular, which does not account specifically for the higher cost of modular sofas. However, I feel like C throws me off as the text establishes nothing about a link between fashionability of the designer and increased price. Maybe the most fashionable designers are also the youngest designers fresh out of school who can’t yet charge high prices for their work as they are so new to the scene. Or perhaps we consider the most fashionable designers as those with the clout to work with cheap brand names (Missoni or Siriano working with Target for example). Again, I get that B doesn’t account, but I’m struggling with locking down why it’s significantly more right than C.
You’re right, those are possibilities. But we need to work with the common sense connection of fashionable designers and high prices (especially considering how many potential interpretations of the word fashion exist). The general population associates fashionable designers with luxury, and wealthier buyers.
Yes, some subset of the population might find young designers fresh out of school to be the most fashionable, but (a) that subset usually has a very specialized knowledge of fashion and (b) those young designers sometimes end up creating luxury brands on the basis of their perceived fashionability. Also, I’d argue that defining fashionable designers as “those with the clout to work with cheap brand names” is pretty uncommon. Brand names don’t necessarily want someone with fashion industry clout to sell their products, they’re looking for marketability (e.g. celebrity clothing lines.) And just because you don’t have the “clout” to work with a mass market brand, doesn’t mean you’re not a fashionable designer.
Hi there!
Still a little confused between A and B. If A in fact would lower costs, this seems like a viable reason why modular furniture would be more expensive since they are not mass produced. Is A wrong because it only has the potential of lowering costs of other furniture? Not guarantees it?
This question is asking us to find the answer that doesn’t help to account for the price difference. (A) does give us a reason for modular furniture to be more expensive, whereas (B) applies to all sofas modular or not, so it can’t explain why the price of one is greater than another. That’s why (B) is the correct answer choice.