#19 - Employee: The company I work for has installed

[Administrator]

Please post below with any questions!

[alxphm]

Hi,

Could someone please explain this to me?

[Francis O'Rourke]

Hi Alx,

Please let us know if you have any specific concerns about this question.

In the stimulus, the employee begins by presenting an action her company has taken and the reasons claimed for that action: website filters have been installed to block non-work-related websites, allegedly because visiting these sites distracts the employees and thus diminishes the work that they do.

The employee then provides a closely related analogy that we can infer would provide a counter argument to the company's explanation: windows and decorations can be distracting to employees, but no one would expect employees to work best in undecorated, windowless offices.


Answer Choice (B) correctly parallels this argument. It begins by explaining a call to ban a certain device and explains the reasons given for it: i.e. prolonged exposure can cause cancer. The speaker then provides an analogy of "most chemicals" causing cancer, yet no one calls for a ban on all of these chemicals.


Answer choice (A) does not provide an explanation for the advice of acting moderately.

Answer choice (C) does not provide an explanation for why Acme expects to retire 1,000 employees, and it also makes a claim about what Acme will do instead.

Answer choice (D) seeks to clarify a claim; it does not argue against what writers are told

Answer choice (E) does not provide an analogy to counter the argument presented. It seeks to point out an absurd inference if we were to agree with the movie industry's standards for success.

[atodell]

I got this question wrong a few months ago, and circling back around just now to review this section, I immediately eliminated all four wrong answers solely on the basis that they didn't contain an analogy. I don't think I picked up on this the first time I saw this question, but now I'm wondering if the lack of analogy is enough to eliminate everything but B. I'm suspicious of my result because of how easy that would make this question, hoping someone can explain to me if my approach on this one is incorrect.

[Ryan Twomey]

Hey Atodell,

That is enough. In parallel reasoning questions, I look for the pattern of reasoning or common argumentative tactic/flaw in the stimulus. In this case we have an analogy.

The correct answer choice must have an analogy and I would eliminate every answer choice without an analogy.

Now in this case that eliminates 4 answer choices. In other parallel questions that may only eliminate 2-3 answer choices. In which case we would then go back up to the stimulus to see if there was another argumentative strategy we missed. If I didn't miss another argumentative strategy, I would then make sure the language in the conclusion matched and the language in the evidence matched between our stimulus and our answer choices, eliminating any answer choice with significantly different language (qualifiers, conditional statements etc).

Another step would be to check the validity. If the stimulus is a valid argument the correct answer choice must be valid. If the stimulus was an invalid argument, the correct answer choice must be an invalid argument.

I always do argumentative tactic/pattern of reasoning first, so you were correct to do it this way! It is a very quick way to do parallel reasoning questions.

Great job and good luck!

Best,
Ryan