#15 - Historian: Scholars writing histories of an era’s business practices must, of course

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Strengthen. The correct answer choice is (D).

Answer choice (A):

Answer choice (B):

Answer choice (C):

Answer choice (D): This is the correct answer choice.

Answer choice (E):

This explanation is still in progress. Please post any questions below!

[CristinaCP]

Hi! Can you please explain why A is wrong? I thought that it strengthened the idea that in studying successful businesses more often than unsuccessful businesses, historians are overestimating the successes of past businesses. If they can't even infer factors from the record that would make a business fail, then how are they going to include those factors in any history of an era? This seems to support the idea that they're overestimating the successes.

Also, doesn't D just strengthen the premise that historians are more likely to study successful businesses than unsuccessful businesses? Aren't correct Strengthen answers supposed to strengthen the support and not just a premise?

[Hanin Abu Amara]

Hi Cristina,

So the stimulus here is arguing that because historians study successful firms more often than they do unsuccessful ones that it means Historians overestimate the success of past businesses.

We want to strengthen.

AC A does not strengthen because all it does is tell us that it's hard to infer what factors lead a business to do poorly. But that would imply that historians are studying businesses that do poorly and one of our premises tells us that they are studying businesses that do well. Therefore A doesn't apply in this instance.

Whereas D tells us why historians aren't studying unsuccessful businesses and that's because we don't have access to those records.

Even those D strengthens a premise, remember that a premise is the support to the conclusion. Strengthening the support = strengthening the argument

[sean.reilly]

I struggled with this one because I misinterpreted the conclusion. I took "it is reasonable to think that business histories overestimate the successes of past businesses" to mean that historians overestimated the success of individual businesses that they studied, not past businesses as a whole. As a result, I struggled to identify the correct AC.

D being correct makes sense if you interpret the conclusion as referring to past businesses in general, as a class. The records we have access to do not provide a representative sample and then bias historians. However, what language or phrase could I have used to better interpret the conclusion? How do we know this refers to past businesses overall rather than overstating the successes of individual past businesses?

[Luke Haqq]

Hi sean.reilly!

You ask,

How do we know this refers to past businesses overall rather than overstating the successes of individual past businesses?

On my reading, this stimulus is pretty direct in referring to "individual past businesses" period, that is, to individual past businesses in general. Since it just refers to individual past businesses and doesn't hedge with any limiting factors, the safest bet is to conclude that it's referring to all individual past businesses. There'd need to be some more limiting language for the stimulus just to be referring to a specific subset of individual past businesses, such as explicitly referring to "individual past businesses that they studied."