#22 - Newspaper: Increases in produce prices

[Robert Carroll]

Harry,

It's not that an increase in community gardening must have the same cause as the increase in personal gardening, but there's no reason it couldn't. It's perfectly compatible with the argument. So it doesn't weaken it.

Answer choice (E) gives a reason that, on its own, can account for the increase in seed sales. In fact, the explanation is pretty antagonistic for the stimulus's explanation - a company going out of business should almost per se increase its still-extant competitors' sales! So now the increased seed sales for certain companies are expected on the basis of the failure of the competitor alone. We have less room for an alternative cause, like the author's cause, which is produce prices. So answer choice (E) is harmful to the argument because it's not perfectly compatible. It makes it harder for the author's cause to work.

Robert Carroll

[HarryK]

Harry,

It's not that an increase in community gardening must have the same cause as the increase in personal gardening, but there's no reason it couldn't. It's perfectly compatible with the argument. So it doesn't weaken it.

Answer choice (E) gives a reason that, on its own, can account for the increase in seed sales. In fact, the explanation is pretty antagonistic for the stimulus's explanation - a company going out of business should almost per se increase its still-extant competitors' sales! So now the increased seed sales for certain companies are expected on the basis of the failure of the competitor alone. We have less room for an alternative cause, like the author's cause, which is produce prices. So answer choice (E) is harmful to the argument because it's not perfectly compatible. It makes it harder for the author's cause to work.

Robert Carroll

Hi Robert,

Thank you for this explanation. Finally, this question is crystal clear to me.

Best,
Harry

[g_lawyered]

Hi P.S.
I had a similar reasoning as posted in the explanations. I understood the conclusion to be: Increased in Produce prices CAUSE Increase in Personal Garden Effect).
Premise: Because more people into personal Garden CAUSE Increase in sale seed companies.

I thought the main focus of the argument was to attack the conclusion (1st sentence: either there isn't an increase in produce price or isn't increase in personal gardens). I didn't think the main focus was the casuality between the seed companies and personal gardens (even though i did recognize that casual argument). The confusing part was that I saw 2 casual arguments and focused on weakening the 1st argument because it was the conclusion.

Because I recognized the causality, To weaken, I paraphrased the 5 ways to weaken a causal argument or that personal gardens weren't increasing.
With my prephrase, I was in between answer choice B and D. I chose D because I thought it introduced that personal gardens are popular because there isn't an economic downturn (another way of showing we don't need the increase of seed sales to have personal gardens).

I was tempted by B because it demonstrates that personal gardens were more popular in earlier years as opposed to present time (which weakens personal gardens aren't increasing).

Can someone please clarify why the focus was the casuality between the increase in seed company sales and increase in personal garden and not the 1st sentence (increase of produce price and personal garden).

What makes answer choice B and D. better than E?

Thanks in advance!

[Robert Carroll]

GGIBA003,

The only evidence the author offers that there is an increase in the planting of personal gardens is in the second sentence, so it should be no surprise that the answer addresses that. You could directly weaken the first sentence and entirely ignore the rest of the stimulus, but that's unlikely to be what an answer does. It's also not what the correct answer does here, validating the idea that we should definitely be looking at the entire stimulus before thinking of a prephrase.

Answer choice (B) looks to me like it could strengthen the argument. When inexpensive produce STARTED to become available, personal gardens were larger. So...why are they smaller now? Because of decades of cheap produce? That's certainly plausible.

Answer choice (D) does nothing to the argument because I have no idea whether there is an economic downturn or not.

Robert Carroll

[g_lawyered]

Thank you for the explanation Robert! I will add your recommendation to my technique for Weaken questions.

[supjeremyklein]

analogy:
last year target and walmart saw a 19% increase of notebook/notebook-paper sales
last year the price of iPads/tablets skyrocketed
this means that the inflated prices of iPads/tablets led people to use more paper/notebooks to jot stuff down

(e) amazon went out of business last year

sidenote:
this argument is about RETAIL sales increasing

when retail sales increase this likely means that more people are buying seeds (or the same number of people are buying more seeds).

the argument isn't talking about WHOLESALE purchases increasing. this would mean that businesses are buying more, or blah blah blah.

so it isn't unreasonable to assume that when there's a 19% increase in toilet paper sales at target and walmart that more people are buying toilet paper (or the same number of people are buying more toilet paper) .

[Robert Carroll]

supjeremyklein,

But we actually have no idea whether retail sales are increasing at all. As your analogy shows, there might be the same retail sales, just distributed between two, instead of three, retailers. So retail sales aren't going up, but the two remaining retailers have THEIR sales go up because they're absorbing sales from a newly-defunct competitor.

Robert Carroll