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#25866
Complete Question Explanation

Main Point—Fill in the Blank. The correct answer choice is (E)

The argument in this stimulus discusses the relationship between a salesperson and the customer, and then draws an analogy to the role played by a person attempting to gain votes for a politician.

The salesperson who makes a sale does not change the desires of the customer, but instead finds out what the customer desires and then convinces him that a particular product will satisfy him. According to the argument, persuading people to vote for a politician to whom they are initially indifferent is a substantially similar activity.

Based on this similarity, your prephrase in this Main Point question is that after discovering what policies the prospective voter would like to see in place, one tries to convince the voter that he should vote for a particular candidate in order to get those policies enacted.

Answer choice (A): This choice is a type of reversal of the information that could complete the analogy. Rather than showing the politician’s opponent does not favor all of those policies, the political operative would try to convince the voter that the politician could satisfy the voter’s policy concerns.

Answer choice (B): This choice is incorrect, because the task of the operative is to differentiate one particular candidate from the others, not to mask their differences.

Answer choice (C): The task of the operative is not to change the voter’s policy preferences, but to convince the voter that a particular candidate can satisfy their policy concerns.

Answer choice (D): While this choice certainly makes sense from a real-world perspective, it does not complete the analogy in the stimulus. Regardless of whether the voter perceives the politician to be of good character and to have interest in some of the same issues, the goal is for the voter to be convinced the politician will satisfy the voter’s policy preferences.

Answer choice (E): This is the correct answer choice. This choice completes the analogy. Just like the salesperson convinces the customer that a certain product will satisfy their needs, the political operative will convince the voter that voting for the politician will result in achieving their policy objectives.
 KG!
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#95886
Hi! Can someone help to explain why E is better than C? How I read the answer choice is that the policies favored by the politician are the ones also favored by the voter, therefore the this political will satisfy hr voters needs. Where did I go wrong ?

Thanks in advance !
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 katehos
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#95897
Hi KG!

Answer choice (C) does not read that the policies favored by the politician are the ones favored by the voter, rather, answer choice (C) reads that "the policies favored by the politician are preferable to those favored by the voter." The word preferable indicates the policies favored by the politician are different (and perhaps better than) the policies favored by the voter.

We can see that this is not analogous to the rest of the stimulus as the stimulus is referring to desires -or policies- that a person already has and how a product -or politician- will satisfy the person. So, we can eliminate (C) because the policies of the politician are different than those of the voter!

I hope this helps :)
Kate
 KG!
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#95916
It does! Thank you!
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 CJ12345:
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#104574
Hi, powerscore,
E: would "the best way" be too strong? Since this is an MSS question, should it be a red flag for such strong wording? I eliminated E right away since I see this strong wording; what's wrong with my thought process?
 Robert Carroll
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#104666
CJ12345:,

One constant reply I have to this kind of situation in a MBT true question is...what would you pick other than answer choice (E)? Every other answer is clearly very bad.

Moving beyond that point, I don't see that the strong language of answer choice (E) is a problem. The answer is not saying that voting for the politician will be the best way to get a given voter's policies adopted. It's instead saying that the politician will try to persuade voters of that. A politician is going to try to be as persuasive as possible! If that politician "overeggs the pudding" by not just trying to convince voters that the politician is a pretty good way to get the voter's preferred policies adopted, but going so far as to persuade voters that they're the best way to get the policies adopted, that seems like the kind of thing a politician would do to be maximally persuasive. "Best" is not doing any work here, good or bad, for the answer.

Robert Carroll

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