#21 - Restaurant critic: Most people agree that the food at

[Lily123]

But in fact the argument being made by the stimulus is that a restaurant's food quality is caused by its level of popularity; if the restaurant is already popular due to another factor, it won't make good food. If a restaurant doesn't have anything else to rely on for customers, then it must make superior food. So (D), as a principle, bolsters that causal link.

Could you break down the parts of the stimulus that pointed you to the causal reasoning?

[Brook Miscoski]

Lily,

The parts of the stimulus that show that there is causal reasoning are in the second sentence. It claims that location is "by itself enough to guarantee" customers. Since that's a claim that location causes customers, you can treat the argument as causal.

If you saw the word "guarantee" as a sufficiency indicator and treated it as a conditional argument, you would still get (D), which gives the correct conditional statement:

-Need Customers -Improve Product.

Since T doesn't need customers (location is already sufficient to provide customers), T won't have the motive to improve its product.

You can do this either way, so don't worry about it, but causal may be easier because the concepts are inherently causal--location attracting customers, motive inducing one to improve a product, etc.

[MichaelYan]

Lily,

The parts of the stimulus that show that there is causal reasoning are in the second sentence. It claims that location is "by itself enough to guarantee" customers. Since that's a claim that location causes customers, you can treat the argument as causal.

If you saw the word "guarantee" as a sufficiency indicator and treated it as a conditional argument, you would still get (D), which gives the correct conditional statement:

-Need Customers -Improve Product.

Since T doesn't need customers (location is already sufficient to provide customers), T won't have the motive to improve its product.

You can do this either way, so don't worry about it, but causal may be easier because the concepts are inherently causal--location attracting customers, motive inducing one to improve a product, etc.

Because the second sentence only mentioned two components: location and popularity, when I was reading, my inference of what the passage is trying to convey was that: since the convenient location of T guarantees customers, location causes T's popularity even on the premise that its food is not as good as M's. In order to strengthen this conclusion, we must exclude other factors that contribute to popularity, which is food quality in this case. Since choice E breaks this connection between food quality and popularity, it strengthened the conclusion of location as the main cause of popularity.

Can you tell me what is wrong with my train of thoughts here?
Also, since the second sentence did not mention food quality, how did you get the causal relationship between popularity and food quality?
Thanks!

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi Michael,

We need to do more than show that it's not just the food. We need to get further---justify that it IS the location. To do that, we need something that justifies why the location of the Traintrack is sufficient to get customers, even without amazing food. Answer choice (D) does so by saying that restaurants only improve when they have to. If the Traintrack already has enough customers, it doesn't need to improve. That justifies our conclusion.

Answer choice (E) does not. It says the quality of the food is irrelevant to popularity, but it doesn't tell you what is relevant. It doesn't justify the mediocre food. Even if the quality of the food doesn't have any impact on the popularity of the restaurant, it doesn't justify the Traintrack not improving product. Maybe they want something other than popularity.

Hope that helps
Rachael

[MillsV]

It seems like a leap to say that a business will improve its products ONLY when it’s necessary, so I got tripped up on this one. How can the "only" be justified in this?

Thank you

[KelseyWoods]

Hi MillsV!

Remember that this is a Strengthen question. We're not trying to prove an answer choice. We're looking for an answer choice that, if true, will strengthen the argument in the stimulus. We don't need to justify the "only." We're just looking to see if the "only" helps our argument.

If it is true that "a business will improve its products only when it is necessary to do so in order to attract customers" that strengthens the conclusion that the discrepancy between Marva's Diner and the Traintrack Inn should come as no surprise. The Traintrack Inn doesn't need to attract more customers because it has a convenient location, so therefore it isn't going to improve its food (this comes from the contrapositive of answer choice (D)). This conditional rule would explain the discrepancy between the restaurants and, thus, strengthen the conclusion that the discrepancy is not surprising.

Hope this helps!

Best,
Kelsey

[Katherinthesky]

Hello,

Could one also say that (E)'s general claim of "no relationship between" is just too strong - since the argument is only specifically talking about two particular restaurants?

Thanks in advance.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

The problem is that answer choice (E) isn't something that would support the facts. It's not that there's no relationship between quality and popularity. It's that there can be factors other than quality of food that impact popularity. If there was no relationship, that wouldn't impact the argument that location does have an impact on quality of food.

Hope that helps!

[g_lawyered]

Hi P.S.,
I had the same reasoning Jay had when breaking down the argument. I thought the principle was that the location was more important to customers as opposed to food quality. When I originally did this question, I picked answer choice B and after reading the explanations, I understand why it's incorrect. After reading James explanation to Jay's question, I still don't understand why answer choice E is incorrect. Answer choice E strengthens the idea that the restaurant is popular because people think convenient location is more important as opposed to food quality (and location is what makes the restaurant popular).

I eliminated answer choice D because of the "necessary" language as I didn't see any conditional reasoning in the argument. I also thought D didn't strengthen because the customers care more about the convenient location rather than the food quality and D emphasizes making the restaurant more popular ("attract customers") by improving food quality. I thought it was the other way around?

Can someone please clarify this.

Thanks in advance!

[Robert Carroll]

GGIBA003,

If there is no relationship between the quality of food and popularity of a restaurant, what could that cause you to predict would happen in the stimulus situation? Quality of food doesn't relate to popularity at all - so the quality of the food would make you unable to make any inference about which restaurant is more popular. The stimulus doesn't reason this way - it reasons that, because the location of the Traintrack Inn is better, the quality of its food is unsurprisingly worse. If convenient location would make something popular, then that's all we need to state - why bring in the quality of food, especially if, as answer choice (E) says, quality of food isn't positive or negative for popularity? Why would a more convenient place have WORSE food - why not just have any quality of food, since quality doesn't relate to popularity at all? Answer choice (E) does not address these questions.

Answer choice (D) precisely does. The quality of the food can be worse IF something else compensates for it. Answer choice (D) does not talk about improving food quality at all - it says a business will improve its products (here, a restaurant improve its food quality) ONLY WHEN it is necessary to attract customers. That's a necessary condition indicator. Well, the location means that the Traintrack Inn does NOT need to do anything else to attract customers. Therefore, according to answer choice (D), the Traintrack Inn will not improve food quality.

There does not have to be conditional reasoning in the stimulus for an answer choice with a conditional statement to be correct.

Robert Carroll