#20 - Voting records regularly show that people over 65

[ShannonOh22]

I'm still very confused by this question. A is worded confusingly, which comes as no surprise. My prephrase did have to do with a problem in the vagueness of the author's designation of the two groups as "over 65" and "young adults" - both are too wide to make a strong inference about voting behaviors. My initial thought was - what about the difference between someone who is 18 and someone who is 22? Or 25? And for "over 65" - does this include someone who is 98? Is that person still voting? Unlikely. We do not, however, know the exact ages the author is referring to when he says "young adults", so how can we be sure that he is referring to the "early stage" of that generation? Or is he referring to the "early stage" of 65+? Nothing in the stimulus provides information about which "stages" of generations are under consideration. Can you guys please explain how this answer is appropriate, given the specific way it is worded?

Also, as someone else pointed out in their post, wouldn't the number of people in each group (B: "relative sizes of the generations compared") actually matter a great deal in determining the level of "connection" the citizens have, if we are to use voting as the sole indicator of that quality? Or are we to assume that because the data comes from the "voting records" that it includes every single vote counted? Given that this is a Flaw question, we are told to consider the stimulus "suspect", therefore not take anything stated in it as "given"...we don't know anything about how the data was collected, nor do we know if the percentages are valid...therefore it seemed to me B points out a stronger flaw here.

Please please provide some insight, and thank you!

[James Finch]

Hi Nicole and Shannon,

The correct answer choice here is pointing out the stimulus's very questionable assumption that voting rates remain static for individual people regardless of age (ie that people who are 40 today would have voted at the same rate as when they were 20, or vice versa) rather than be correlated to age (as happens in reality) where people tend to be more likely to vote as they individually grow older. Ideally, this would be the flaw that you would spot and Prephrase.

As flaws can be easy to spot at times, the test makers love to increase the difficulty on late-section flaw questions by making the answer choices harder to understand. This means that it's possible on some of these questions to have an excellent Prephrase and still get the question wrong because you didn't understand what the correct answer choice was actually saying. This has been a common approach on recent tests, and this question is a great example of it.

(A)'s meaning takes a moment to parse, as there is some commonsense assumptions about definitions involved. First, we must understand what is meant by "generation" as it has already been introduced in the stimulus's conclusion. Generally, it means a group of people born within the same approximately 20-year band (such as 1980-2000 for millennials). Then we have to understand what is meant by early- and late-stages of generations; this is a little clearer, as "young adult" indicates somewhere in the 18-34 age range, which seems to fit with "early" stages of a generation, versus 65+, which would definitely be the "late" stages of an earlier generation. The key takeaway is that the stimulus is comparing apples and oranges, in that people are very different as young adults than as senior citizens, and that this comparisons is being made of two different generations alive at the same time, but at very different age ranges, which could just as easily account for the voting rate discrepancy as the idea that the older generation was always more likely to vote than this younger one.

Hope this clears things up!

[ser219]

I picked B and my thought process was:


What if people over 65 were 10 people in total, and 9 people voted (=90%) vs. young adults were 100 and 50 people voted (=50%)

Then the conclusion that as generations pass people are disconnected doesn't work --> More than 9 people in young adults voted!

So I'm guessing the distinction is in the "with each passing generation," where the argument is trying to say something similar to "as time goes by," which cannot be assumed given that this is a cross-sectional study?

Thank you,
Nicole

I was between A, B, and E on this question and I picked B for reasons similar to the ones above. I had some confusion determining what the author meant by the percentages. Were the "highest percentages" mentioned the probability of someone in a particular age group to vote or the percentage of total votes. The percentage aspect confused me and resulted in me picking B. Could someone please explain very precisely what is going on with the percentages in this stim because it is really the main thing that held me back from picking A.

[Adam Tyson]

Often we are faced with an argument that uses percentages in the premises and then draws a conclusion about numbers, or vice versa. If this argument had concluded "therefore, fewer young adults than people over 65 vote," we would have that sort of flaw.

In this case, however, we have premises about percentages, and a conclusion that is ALSO about percentages. Becoming increasingly disconnected is another way of saying less likely to participate, such as by voting, and "likely" is a percentages concept. Voting in lower percentages means a smaller portion of the group votes, and the size of the group doesn't matter. So the problem here is NOT about a bad use of numbers and percentages. Instead, it's about an improper use of data.

Young adults vote less, while older people vote more. If we accept that this is regularly the case, as the stimulus says, then as today's young people age, they should start voting in higher percentages. It's not that generations are becoming less connected - it's that they become MORE connected as they age! You can't just look at 20-somethings and 70-somethings in 1985. You have to look at those 20-somethings in 1985 and then look at the same people again in 1995 and 2005 and 2015, as they become 30-something and 40-something and 50-something, and see if they change. If they continue to vote in low percentages, the author might be onto something, but if they increase their participation (which the stimulus indicates does happen) then the author is off-base. That's the issue - a snapshot of two groups at one moment in time tells you nothing about how one or the other group may change over time. That's what answer A is about.

B is wrong because numbers don't matter if all we are concerned with is percentages or likelihood.
C is wrong because the author doesn't have to explain the phenomenon. That's not a flaw.
D is wrong because the author didn't mix up cause and effect. The cause, he thinks, is being less connected, and the effect is voting less.
E is wrong because his argument is about what has been happening, not about what will happen later. It's not about whether the pattern will change, but whether the pattern he thinks he sees really exists.