LR Question 24 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Columnist: On average, about 70 percent of the profit…
QUESTION TYPE: Most Strongly Supported
FACTS:
- About 70% of tourism industry profit in developing countries goes to foreign owners.
- The more established the tourist destination, the more profits go abroad, in general.
- Tourists can avoid this transfer abroad by dealing directly with locals.
ANALYSIS: I couldn’t think of how to combine anything. When that happens, I just make sure I know the facts clearly before moving on.
The more you can memorize a list like the one I wrote above, the easier the answers will be. I at least skim over a MSS question again before I check the answers. This lets me retain information better and go through the answers faster.
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- The question doesn’t tell us what people should do. It only says what tourists can do. Maybe it doesn’t matter if profits stay in a country or go abroad.
- CORRECT. This is very well supported. In the average country, 70% of revenues go to foreign owners. And in developed tourist markets, even more tends to go to foreign owners.
So mathematically, at least some of the countries with the most developed tourist industries send most (51%+) of their profits to foreign owners. - The stimulus said that people could get services from locals. It didn’t say that they actually do.
- Nonsense. The author said that tourism profits tend to go abroad. But that doesn’t mean the country gets poorer. In fact unless 100% of profits go abroad, tourism will probably make a country richer.
- Hard to say. Some of locals’ spending might end up in the hands of foreign owners.
For instance, imagine a local takes a bus owned by a tourist company in order to go to a tourist location where they’ll sell their native crafts.
The local gets the money from the sale of the crafts, but they still gave some money to the foreign owners.
More Resources for Most Strongly Supported Questions
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Most Strongly Supported questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers most strongly supported questions.
Also, a more high-level explanation on (E): they might contribute to 1% to the profits of foreign owners and to 99% to those of local people, they still counteract the effect…
Yes, good point. You can negate E in that way and it doesn’t contradict the facts above. Therefore E as stated isn’t supported. Negations as you have done can be a useful tool outside of necessary assumption questions. It is always helpful to think “what if this weren’t true? What is this answer eliminating?”
Note: This is an old comment but I wanted to clarify the point.
Quick comment on D: it is not necessary that less of 100% of the profits go abroad to make local people progressively poorer.
A more precise indicator would be whether the overall profits from tourism are increasing or decreasing. Here, we only have the information that the share of the money which is earned from tourism and gets exported is increasing. We don’t know whether the overall tourism market in those countries is increasing or decreasing (if the share grows by 5% and the overall market grows by 50% a year, then the country would indeed become progressively richer).
Also, we cannot even be sure that they get poorer if the market overall decreases. The local people might have other income sources which are growing ;)