#16 - Corporate businesses, like species, must adapt to

[AthenaDalton]

Hi TOgren,

I don't think that an answer choice stating that "a business cannot adapt without becoming a different corporation" would be correct for this problem.

The prompt tells us that "sometimes a business cannot adapt without changing its core corporate philosophy" and then goes on to conclude that "sometimes a business can survive only by becoming a different corporation."

The key word here is "sometimes." Presumably, there are examples of businesses successfully adapting without having to resort to changing their core corporate philosophies and / or becoming different corporations.

I hope this makes sense! Good luck studying!

-Athena Dalton

[Iam181]

Hi there,

Hope all is well!

Would you please explain how the word "sometimes" functions within the stimulus and the answer choice E?

Understanding the "Sometimes" functionality was the biggest issue in attacking this question for me.

I didn't know what to do with it. I thought it is introducing a conditional statement and therefore was confused how the conditional statements relate to each other.


Thank you very much!

[Jeremy Press]

Hi Iam181,

The "sometimes" doesn't change much about the analysis here.

There is still a conditional relationship in both the premise immediately preceding the conclusion, and the conclusion. The premise immediately preceding the conclusion means something like, "there are certain circumstances in which this conditional relationship holds: Adapt Change Core Philosophy." If you wanted to diagram that as a "some" statement, you'd have to diagram like so: Circumstances (Adapt Change Core Philosophy). The conclusion means, "there are circumstances in which this conditional relationship holds: Survive Become a Different Corporation." If you wanted to diagram that as a "some" statement, you'd have to diagram as: Circumstances (Survive Become a Different Corporation).

When considering the assumption underlying the stimulus reasoning, the "sometimes" drops out of consideration, because in both the premise and conclusion the author presumably means to be limiting the argument to the same "limited circumstances." It's for those circumstances that the conditional relationship in answer choice E must hold.

Let me know if this clears things up at all? Great question!

Jeremy

[haganskl]

Hello!

I misunderstood answer choice C to mean what answer choice E says so I got #16 wrong. However, I didn’t know how to negate answer choice E. How would I do that? I’m confused because the answer choice is in the form of a conditional statement.

Orrrr, is negation unnecessary because the conditional language in answer choice E links up with the conditional language in the stim? I diagrammed each conditional statement found in the stim and accurately but more times than not, with assumption questions, I’m just left with a blank mind after putting all of them together. So my other big question here is, if I find a conditional statement in the answer choices that links with my conditional statements from the stim, specifically to the conclusion, and on the necessary end, I should choose it?

Thanks in advance.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi haganskl,

Let's start with the first question. Answer choice (E) can be negated by simply removing the word "not" in cannot. So the negated form of answer choice (E) would say something like "A business can change its corporate philosophy without becoming a different corporation." This hurts our conclusion, because the conclusion states that once we know the corporate philosophy changes, the corporation is a different corporation. If that link wasn't present, we couldn't draw the conclusion drawn in the argument.

In terms of how you should approach this if you see an assumption answer choice that links conditional relationships in this way, it depends on your confidence level. You should only be using the assumption negation technique when it's necessary for you to answer the question. If you are confident than an answer choice is necessary for the conclusion to follow, like in a supporter assumption scenario like this one, I would not use the assumption negation technique. I'd select the answer that matches the prephrase, and move on. That's on test day though---for practice, make sure you try the technique in all sorts of scenarios and all sorts of assumption questions (and all sorts of answer choices) to make it easy and automatic when you do need to use it.

Hope that helps!
Rachael

[nivernova]

I got this correct and I understand why all wrong answer choices are wrong.

However, I'm not sure how the negated version of C isn't able to destroy the argument.

It will be "Different corporations DO NOT have different core corp philosophies".

And the author argues and assumes that when you change your corp philosophy, then you become a different corp.

But according to the negated C, even if you've become a different, then you still have the same philosophy, because different corps have philosophies NOT DIFFERENT from those of each other's, which basically means that they all share the same philosophy.

Thank you

[Hanin Abu Amara]

Hi!

This answer choice is a tricky one to negate. When we're negating in assumption questions, it can have different negated meanings. For answer choice C we can say not all different corporations have different core philosophies.

This negated form wouldn't destroy the argument. I don't need ALL corporations to have different core philosophies. I would need only some to.

When negating in the assumption there are different strengths we can negate to and whatever answer choice we select has to hold up no matter how strong our negation is.