LR Question 16 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Economist: If the economy grows stronger, employment…
QUESTION TYPE: Necessary Assumption
CONCLUSION: It will be harder to find daycare workers in a strong economy.
REASONING: If the economy is stronger, many daycare workers will find better jobs in another field.
ANALYSIS: This argument makes the error of looking at only one side of things. Sure, some daycare workers will leave. But will there still be new daycare workers? In that case, there’s no problem. The author is assuming that there won’t be enough new daycare workers to replace those that leave.
Note that we will need more daycares. So the argument doesn’t depend on the number of workers decreasing. It’s only necessary that the number doesn’t increase fast enough to match the increase in demand. This eliminates C and E.
___________
- Who cares about most jobs? We’re only concerned with daycare jobs.
Also, negating a “most” statement is typically useless, since you’re moving from 50.000000001% to 50%. No matter what an answer says, it’s extremely difficult for “most” to have an impact on necessary assumption questions. - CORRECT. If there are significantly more new daycare workers, then there won’t be a shortage. Note that there’s no way to negate this without destroying the argument, due to the “significantly”.
Negation: There number of new daycare workers will be significantly greater than the number of those leaving. - This strengthens the argument, but it isn’t necessary. There is going to be an expanding need for daycare work, so even if the number of workers stays the same there will be a shortage.
- This isn’t necessary. It’s possible there are other ways to cause a daycare shortage. The argument didn’t say that workers leaving is the only way to cause a shortage.
- It doesn’t matter if the total decreases. The author was arguing that the number wouldn’t increase to match demand.
On this one — the “significantly” made me question B. Wouldn’t the argument still hold if the number of new day care workers wasn’t significantly greater than the number who left, but just enough to enough to replace + meet the needs of the new children? The argument says nothing about “significantly” more parents needing to find day care for young children, just “more parents.”
It’s true we normally would say “negate in the slightest way possible”. From this perspective you might think you could negate “significantly greater” to “greater, but not significantly”.
Trouble is, the answer has a “not” in it, and there’s only one way to negate a not: you remove it. So you get “the number if new daycare workers *will* be significantly greater”. And if this is true, it wrecks the argument, so the author has to assume it’s not true.
is the “significantly greater than” in B really necessary?
Yup. Think of it this way: suppose you want to get into law school. Is it necessary you get higher than a 120? Yes. Is it also necessary that you can higher than a 121? Also yes. And so on.
This answer isn’t picking the exact point where something flips from necessary to not necessary. It simply makes something that IS necessary.
And if we negate it, and say “there will be significantly more new workers” then the argument falls apart.
So there could have been others ways to phrase a necessary answer. But this one is definitely necessary.
Note: This is an old comment but I wanted to clarify the point.