#24 - Telephone companies are promoting "voice mail" as an

[Jerrymakehabit]

Can someone please help me with choice B?

I understand why D is correct. The conclusion is that all VM benefits will make answering machines obsolete soon.
B says the surge of answering machines occurred shortly after they came into market. So the promotion of VM and its benefits could be just another surge which could obsolete soon too. Does this slightly weaken the conclusion? Am I making too many assumptions in my analysis?

Thanks
Jerry

[Adam Tyson]

I think you are, Jerry, and this one is simpler than that. The companies argue that voicemail will make answering machines obsolete because it has several benefits compared to the machines. To weaken that claim, we should be looking for some benefit of answering machines that voicemail doesn't have, some advantage that could perhaps allow the machines to stay relevant rather than obsolete. That's answer D, as you correctly noted.

Answer B does nothing to tell us whether answering machines will become obsolete. Even your analysis, with some added assumptions, is focused entirely on what will become of voicemail, and not what will happen to answering machines. Maybe voicemail will become obsolete, replaced by something else that comes after it, but if answering machines are first made obsolete by voicemail then our author is still correct. It doesn't matter what happens to voicemail in the future - it only matters what impact it will have on the machines! Answer B gives us no information about that, and so it, like my mom's old answering machine, is obsolete.

[pablourioste]

I thought A was the answer because I interpreted "all calls will be completed" to mean all incoming calls will rack up full charges including charges on the side for the owner of voice mail, while the voice machine interrupts calls in a way that it doesn't rack up a charge for the reciever; thus, voice machines retain its competitive advantage by being cheaper. What did this mean then?

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi pablourioste,

This test was from 1999, and the technology then was a bit different than now. Back then, landlines often would give a busy signal if the line was in use. That meant that people calling a landline and using an answering machine would not know anyone was even trying to reach them. The next stage of technology was something called "call waiting" where it would beep and allow you to pick up the other call if you were already using the line, but it still did not let anyone leave a message while you were on the phone. So if the call line was in use, someone calling a person with a landline would potentially not have a completed call.

The voicemail system would have been an advantage. Even if the call line is in use, a person could still leave a message and complete the call.

Most of the time, questions won't require such an extensive knowledge of obsolete technology. And certainly, the test you take as a real exam would be unlikely to require this sort of outside knowledge.