#22 - A study of 20,000 20- to 64-year olds found that

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Must Be True. The correct answer choice is (E).

No argument here, just facts, followed by a Most Strongly Supported question stem, which is the softer variant of Must Be True This means that the correct answer doesn't absolutely have to be true, but it will be a reasonable inference based solely on the facts given to us (the Fact Test), while none of the other answers will have any such support. In this case we learned that satisfaction with income is derived not from how much you make, but how much you make relative to your immediate neighbors. You don't have to be rich to be satisfied - you just have to be richer than the folks next door.

Answer choice (A): This answer is not only unsupported by the stimulus, but appears to contradict it. If satisfaction is derived from comparing oneself to one's immediate neighbors, and if we tend to live surrounded by people in our same economic strata, then there should be plenty of dissatisfied wealthy people and plenty of middle class people who are very satisfied.

Answer choice (B): There is no support in the stimulus for any differences between age groups, so this answer is a loser.

Answer choice (C): Probably the most attractive of the wrong answers, this misstates the facts presented in the stimulus. This answer, if true, would mean that people in some neighborhoods are more satisfied than people in other neighborhoods. While "neighborhood" is an important factor in the stimulus, the comparison isn't between one neighborhood and another, but between people within a given neighborhood.

Answer choice (D): This answer plays a bit of a shell game with us. The stimulus is about satisfaction with one's income, but this answer is about satisfaction with life in general, a very different concept. Since the stimulus gave us no information about any connection between income and satisfaction with life as a whole, we have to reject this answer.

Answer choice (E): This is the correct answer choice. If everyone's income goes up (including yours and your neighbors'), and if actual income has little bearing on satisfaction with that income, then this increase should not have much impact on that level of satisfaction. Only an increase or decrease relative to one's neighbors should have that kind of impact. This is supported by the claims in the stimulus and is therefore the credited response.

[mpoulson]

Hello,

I wanted to determine what specifically was wrong with C? I can see how E is the answer upon further review, but it wasn't clear to me why C is wrong. Thank you.

V/r,

Micah

[Nikki Siclunov]

Micah,

It would help if you can explain in some detail what made answer choice (C) particularly attractive. How did you understand the original fact set? How does it support the claim that satisfaction with income correlates with neighborhood? Satisfaction depends on how favorably your income compares with those of your neighbors (so, if you make a lot more than your neighbors, you'd feel satisfied), but that doesn't prove that satisfaction with income correlates with neighborhood (i.e. people from poorer neighborhoods are less satisfied with their incomes, while those from fancy suburbs are more satisfied)? This may appear to be true in the real world, but not according to the facts in the stimulus.

Thanks!

[mokkyukkyu]

I'm still not sure between C and E...
I think we can know this from the last sentence, because it says "depend". Depend means correlation right?
Also, I thought the stimulus itself have self-contradiction.
It says "live in neiborhoods of people from their same economic class" but then it says "people's satisfaction with their incomes depends largely on how favorably their incomes compare with those ofhtier neighbors."
I'm confused here...doesn't it contradict?

[Nikki Siclunov]

There is no contradiction here. Here are the facts:

1. How much people make - in absolute terms - does not correlate with how satisfied they are with their income. Making 10% more than you made last year will not necessarily make you more happy/satisfied.

2. However, apparently people's satisfaction with their incomes is a function of how their incomes compare to those of their neighbors. So, although making 10% more than you made last year will not necessarily make you more happy/satisfied, if you're the only one in your neighborhood who got a raise - you'll probably be happier. And inversely (and perhaps counterintuitively), if you - along with everyone in your neighborhood - got a 20% pay raise, you aren't gonna be terribly stoked about it.

The take-home message is that income satisfaction is all relative, and we can't help but compare ourselves with those around us, whether or not we're objectively better or worse off. That's why answer choice (E) is correct.

Hope this makes sense. Let me know.

Thanks,

[Oneshot06]

Hi, I'm still unsure why C.) is wrong? The only difference I can see is between neighbors and neighborhood, but I've done questions where I'm supposed to take like words and infer same meaning, so I can't rely just on the difference between two like words.

[Francis O'Rourke]

Hi Oneshot06

Answer choice (C) tells us that income and the neighborhood one lives in are "strongly correlated." This means that if you identified the neighborhood that I live in, you could make a statistically well informed estimate of how satisfied I am with my income. Ask yourself where you see support for this in the stimulus.

In fact the stimulus is saying almost the opposite of this. Satisfaction is not correlated with one's total income according to the first sentence. The second sentence tells us that people live in neighborhoods that are usually filled with people who make similar income, so we can then say that satisfaction is not generally correlated with the neighborhood one lives in.

Rather, the study finds that people who live in Beverly Hills or Midtown Manhattan are not necessarily more satisfied with their incomes than are people who live in Flint, Michigan. Instead, if you earn one hundred thousand dollars a year, but your neighbor is pulling in over a million, then you are going to be unhappy with your earnings. Likewise the person making $40,000 per year living next to people earning half that amount is going to feel good about their income.

Let me know if this helps!

[Oneshot06]

Thanks Francis. I think I've now wrapped my head around it:

People live in neighborhoods that can predict their economic class, but that doesn't mean they're satisfied with their income. Rather, satisfaction comes from how they compare to their neighbors.

Thanks!

[johnmansour830@yahoo.com]

Would answer choice (C) be correct if they said, "Satisfaction with income is strongly correlated with their neighbor's income"? That is how I narrowed it down to E in BR. We're not concerned with the neighborhood as a whole but the individual neighbor's income.

[katehos]

Hi johnmansour830!

You're definitely right that the people in the stimulus are not concerned with neighborhood so much as they are concerned with their income relative to that of their neighbors! As written, (C) does the opposite of that, which is why it can be eliminated. If (C) were to say what you wrote, it would certainly be a much better answer!

Hope this helps
Kate