#15 - If the glee club pays cash today to rent the equipment

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below!

[lanereuden]

What’s wrong with c? Would c be correct if it said will accept rather than will not accept?

[lanereuden]

15
Is c wrong because negating it will only validate and not devalidate the Argument?

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi lanereuden,

Let's break down the stimulus.

If the glee club pays cash today, then the usual rental agency will accept less money then the club would pay next Saturday. The club will wait until next Saturday to pay, therefore the glee club doesn't care about saving money.

First thing to notice is that the conclusion, that the glee club doesn't care about saving money, is not part of our conditional premise. We need to somehow link the concept of caring about saving money to the original conditional. That's the large jump in the conclusion. We have no way to know WHY the committee isn't paying until Saturday. In order to say that their actions were due to not caring about saving money, we need to eliminate every other alternate cause.

That's what answer choice (e) does. It eliminates the alternate cause of waiting. They didn't wait just because they lacked the cash to pay early. If they DID lack the cash to pay early, it would hurt the conclusion that the reason for waiting until Saturday was that they didn't care about saving money.

When we look at answer choice (c), it doesn't really impact our argument. Even if there is a rental agency that would not give a discount for paying in cash early, it doesn't impact the argument because we know at least one rental agency (the usual one) IS willing to give a cash discount.

Think about it this way. Imagine an argument that went like this: Betty could save 5% on her purchase at Target by using her Target card. Betty does not use her Target card, therefore, she doesn't care about saving 5%.

It wouldn't impact the argument at all if you knew that Betty would not save 5% using her Target card at Old Navy. It has nothing to do with the argument about Target. Similarly, what other rental agencies will do is irrelevant to the argument that the committee could save money by paying in cash from the usual agency.

Hope that helps!
Rachael

[lanereuden]

If c had said: at least one rental agency WILL ACCEPT a lower price ...would that be the correct answer?

[Paul Marsh]

Hi lanereuden! So we're pretending Answer Choice (C) reads, "At least one rental agency will accept a lower price for equipment rental today than it would accept next Saturday".

But we already know that to be true! Look at the first sentence of the stimulus: "If the glee club pays cash today to rent the equipment it needs for next Saturday's party, its usual rental agency will accept a much lower price than the club would pay for renting the equipment next Saturday". That sentence tells us that there is at least one rental agency that will accept a lower price for equipment rental today than it would accept next Saturday. So our alternate version of Answer Choice (C) is best characterized as just a re-statement of one of the premises of the argument - it would not be characterized as an assumption required by the argument.

So no, (C) would still not be a correct answer in that case. If you have any more questions about this feel free to follow up, but I think Rachael's explanation above is really well written and does a great job of examining how to attack the problem. Hope that helps!

[mseggio]

You can also think of this in terms of the following: What answer choice explains that the committee didn't put off paying for the rental for no good reason (just to now incur a higher cost at a later date)?
- Combine this with the Assumption-Negation Technique, and read answer choice E aloud ("there is NOT enough cash"...)

ANS choice E gives some GOOD (valid based on the premises) reason as to why the committee might opt to rent the equipment at a higher cost/later date, even when given the option to rent the equipment at a lower cost/earlier date.