#3- Statistics from the National Booksellers Association

[karen_k]

Hi!

When I first did this question, I overlooked A and chose E. Looking back, I understand why A is a better answer but why exactly is E wrong? Thank you!

[jeff.wren]

Hi Karen,

Thanks for your question. The problem with answer choice (E) is that it mentions "overseas" customers. Here, the word "overseas" is being used to mean other countries. Since this argument only concerns the national campaign to encourage people to read more, statistics about customers from other countries are not relevant.

I hope this helps.

Best,
Jeff

[karen_k]

Thank you, Jeff!

[taylorballou]

Hello,

I narrowed down my contenders to answer choices A and B. I chose B because I thought the fact that newspapers and periodicals selling more than fiction books showed efforts to increase reading have been successful in specific genres. Is B incorrect because it does not discuss any type of book/periodical/etc. sales increasing?

Thank you,

Taylor

[Eric Ockert]

Hi Taylor!

Careful, the efforts here were not to encourage more reading generally but, rather, to encourage people to read more fiction, specifically. So, the argument in the conclusion is essentially that these campaigns (to read more fiction) have not been successful. So, if our job is to weaken this argument, we need an answer that suggests that perhaps these campaigns to read more fiction have been successful.

Answer choice (B) mentions newspapers and periodicals which are not fiction (at least, without further information, we cannot interpret these items as fiction). This does not provide any evidence that the fiction reading campaigns have been successful. Therefore, it is incorrect.

Answer choice (A), on the other hand, specifically mentions other types of fiction sales going up. This would suggest that maybe the fiction reading campaigns have had some success. That weakens the author's claim that they have not been successful, and is therefore correct.

Hope that helps!

[Alisahoban]

Why is c not the answer since it offers an alternative reason why sales of fiction books might not be increasing (that other books are cheaper) so the campaign could have still been successful but the impact diminished by the sale of other books

[James Finch]

Hi Alisa,

The goal of this Weaken question is simply to undercut the idea that the campaign to get people to read more fiction has been unsuccessful. The stimulus's only evidence for this is that revenues, not sales, of fiction have been declining in bookstores. That's a huge logical gap, and we could Prephrase a ton of different reasons why there could be lower revenue and yet more interest in fiction: people going to libraries instead of buying books, buying ebooks instead of going to bookstores, fiction cover prices dropping for whatever reason, etc.

(A) corresponds perfectly to the idea that people are more interested in fiction, just getting it from different sources than bookstores. (C) doesn't work because it requires an additional assumption that lower-priced biographies would cause people to buy fewer fiction books, something we can't simply assume to be true. Without this linkage of cheaper biographies leading to less fiction sold, this answer choice can't weaken the conclusion on its own.

Hope this clears things up!