#24 - The last outdoor drive-in movie theater in Nova Scotia closed

[Christmaspuppy]

Hi!

The flaw I found of the argument is part-whole flaw. Although there were enough audiences during the closing time, it doesn't mean the claim about the whole period is wrong. So I think I can understand why answer C is correct. But I also think answer E has the same flaw. Athletic department is a part of the whole library. Even if its budget is increasing doesn't mean the claim about cutting fund of the whole library is wrong. Could you explain this for me?

Thanks!

[Beth Hayden]

Hi Christmas,

You are right that it is a part to whole flaw, but there's a little bit more to it. The idea is that they looked at a small and biased sample to make a conclusion about movie ticket sales on average in the past. It makes sense that more people would buy tickets for movies in the last week the theater was in operation, after they heard the theater was going to close, because people wanted to take advantage before it went out of business. They had an added incentive to go to the theater that week which skewed the numbers from the average.

Answer choice (C) has a similar problem. You can't extrapolate to the entire student body the opinions of not just a small subset of those students, but a subset that we know is biased (because the people who were opposed to the budget cuts were probably a lot more likely to go to the meeting).

However, answer choice (E) has a slightly different problem. There, they aren't extrapolating a claim about the library's funding in the aggregate based on the small sample of the fund drive last year--and even if they did, we have no reason to believe that last year was unrepresentative. Instead, they are looking at funding for a totally different department, the athletic department, which is not a subset of the library at all. Sure, both are subsets of the university's total funding, but the conclusion is not about the school's funding, it's only about the library's funding. Your analysis seems to be assuming that the athletic department is a subset of the whole library, but there's nothing in (E) to indicate that.

I hope that helps!
Beth