Q15 - If the glee club pays cash today

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Necessary Assumption

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: The committee clearly cares little about saving money.
Evidence: They would save money if they paid the equipment rental charge today vs. next Saturday (day of the party), and the committee knows that.

Answer Anticipation:
The Missing Link assumption would be something like, "If you knowingly wait to pay more money for the same thing, then you care little about saving money".

But I would assume that this is going to be a Defender type answer. How could we object to this argument and say that the committee DOES care a lot about saving money? We could say: they don't have the cash available right now but they will by next Saturday ... they're not 100% sure the party next Saturday is gonna happen (maybe it's weather contingent), so they don't want to pay fo the rental in advance. Thus, the author is assuming "they DO have the cash available right now" and "they ARE sure the party is going to happen WITH this equipment rental", etc.

Correct Answer:
E

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) This weakens the argument, so the author is not assuming it.

(B) Most' is wrong almost 100% of the time on Nec Assump. Does it matter whether 51% vs. 49% of the party committee knows the financial situation? Do you even need to know a financial situation to be able to judge that "pay today = cheaper than pay next week"?

(C) This is saying, "The author assumes that there's a different rental company out there (not the usual one), and this different rental company DOESN'T offer a lower price for paying in advance". The author doesn't need to assume that ANY other rental agencies exist, in the first place. And so she definitely doesn't need to assume that some other rental agency DOESN'T have the same "pay in advance discount" as the usual rental agency.

(D) This could weaken, so the author is not assuming it. We might say, "Hey, the committee cares a lot about saving money; it just has a number of responsibilities that take priority over saving money."

(E) YUP. If we negate this, it says "there's not enough cash available to buy it today". Okay, that blows up the argument. It's not that the committee doesn't care about saving money. They just don't have the option of paying for it today!

Takeaway/Pattern: The author's argument was essentially, "Because the glee club isn't taking action X, we can infer Y." And the correct answer is saying, "You're assuming that they even have the option of taking action X." It'd be kind of like saying, "Peter knows that if he bought his new car with cash, instead of financing it, he would ultimately pay less for the car. Clearly, Peter cares little about saving money." Maybe he cares a ton about saving money, but he doesn't have the $20k it would take the buy the car outright.

#officialexplanation