Q24 - Market analyst: According to my

[aileenann]

Complete-the-argument questions involve two considerations. First, they are often disguised conclusion questions, so that we want to keep logical inferences and strict scope considerations in mind. Second, to a much lesser degree, we want to think about flow.

Here, the author mentioned two things in the argument, and they were both facts/premises. First, the author said that most people expect to pay their bills before interest accrues. Then the author said that credit card companies concentrate on the services their customers care most about when trying to win over customers from other companies. The first thing that comes to mind for me, and I’m guessing most readers, is that the customers probably don’t care too much about anything related to interest if they don’t plan to ever pay it. While common sense might dictate that you should care a little in the real world in case something unforeseen happens, this is LSAT logic we’re talking about.

Let’s take a look at the answers keeping in mind our conclusion but also staying open to other logically sound conclusions.

(A) is just silly _ it’s clearly unsupported by any of the statements above.
(B) sounds about right. This involves interest rates and what people do or do not want. Specifically it says what you might even have realized above _ that since interest rates are irrelevant to most people (at least according to their expectations), they probably won’t think about this in choosing a credit card.
(C) is out of scope _ there is nothing in the passage about borrowing money from banks.
(D) looks more like a new premise than a conclusion. We don’t have enough in the passage to support an inference about whether the period of time matters.
(E) has many indicators that it is not the correct answer _ "most intense" and also the introduction of a new idea _ the number of places who accept the card.

Interestingly, this is a pretty straightforward question if you work by process of elimination, even though it comes rather late in the section. That said, it was important here to keep in mind what we knew logically to be true, or we could have been misled with some of the trickier answer choices.

[pinkdatura]

Thank you for explanation, aileenann.
I had a hard time choosing between B&E, recently I am thinking why E is wrong I understand one reason is abandoned as "most intense", too extreme;
I am wondering can we understand "increase number of places that they can get to accept their credit card" as one kind of paraphrase as "intending use the cards only to avoid carrying cash"? In this sense, does this choice have some value? Or since there might be too many forms of service can achieve the fact of making clients conveniently using cards only to avoid carrying cash, concluding adding more ATM as the most intensive competition is too hasty?
Thx

[mitchliao]

Do I have a faulty copy of this test? My question #24 starts with "Eighteenth-century European aesthetics was reasonably successful..."

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

No, your copy is good. I think this thread was started shortly after the test results were published and so the numbering of each section hadn't been quite determined. I've fixed the thread title.

Thanks for catching that!

[AllyMaeBell]

Here's another explanation:

24. (B)
Question Type: Inference
On an inference question, your job is to look for the most provable answer choice based on the text. You do NOT need to look for the core! Find the answers that are easy to eliminate first, then come back to the trickier ones.

(C) The only thing we know about interest on credit cards is that 59% of consumers anticipate never paying it! We don’t know anything about how they feel about interest on credit cards versus borrowing money from banks. Eliminate it.
(D) The text suggests the opposite"”59% of consumers intend to pay their balance before interest starts to accrue, implying that they would be likely to pay attention to the length time a company allows before starting to charge interest
(E) There is no mention of the number of places that accept a credit card anywhere in the text.

Now it’s between (A) and (B). We don’t know enough about what consumers want to assume that they would be "indifferent" to which credit card they use---maybe there are distinctive features besides interest rates that would draw a consumer to one card over another. Eliminate (A). Answer choice (B) is correct"”since 59% of consumers don’t expect to pay interest, and most credit card companies try to improve services that their clients are interested in, it follows that credit cards would not make interest rates their main selling point.

[mic_a_chav87]

I thought 24 in LR1 was an incredibly deceptive answer and I would like to address it:

First of all, upon first reading I choose B because it fit nicely in the blank and seemed to follow logically from the premises. Upon second reading, I decided that B was concerned with what should be credit card companies "selling point" whereas the stimulus clearly states "credit card companies tend to concentrate on improving the services their customers are the most interested in." It doesn't say they highlight those services when selling, it only states that they improve them. If this is of primary concern, wouldn't to conclusion logically have to be about companies not improving interest rates or improving something else about their business?

Then I saw E, which seemed implausible at first because it says "the most intense competition..." which as a savvy LSAT taker I know is difficult to prove and to never choose answers with such strong language unless specifically substantiated by the stimulus. Comparing it to the stimulus though I saw that 59% of their customer were "intending to use the cards only to avoid carrying cash and writing checks..." meaning avoiding carrying cash and writing checks must be these customers primary concern.

Now, since we know companies primarily care about improving services their customers are most interested in, and we know a majority of their customer must be most interested in using cards to avoid cash or checks, doesn't E extremely logically follow this train of thought?

It's not worded as nicely, and it wasn't my first guess, but I have never seen so much evidence for a supposed wrong answer before now. Please help me!

[alana.canfield]

Now, since we know companies primarily care about improving services their customers are most interested in, and we know a majority of their customer must be most interested in using cards to avoid cash or checks, doesn't E extremely logically follow this train of thought?

I think the problem with E is that it requires some assumptions (like you said, it is extreme). The first assumption is that there aren't more intense areas of competition among credit companies, perhaps ones that don't involve marketing to customers at all. Just because the passage says that credit card companies concentrate on their customers, doesn't mean the most INTENSE competition is in that area (it could be in buying real estate for their business or anything really). Another assumption is that it isn't easy and trivial to get your credit card accepted at a place; if it is easy and trivial then this wouldn't be a point of competition. Another assumption is that the customers of a credit card company shop at more than one place (probably obvious, but still an assumption).

Answer choice B is a more logical conclusion to me because it relies solely on the stimulus and doesn't require extra assumptions and doesn't present extra information. That also makes it flow better to me.

[phil.ogea]

I am a bit confused by this discussion because people seem to be completely ignoring a component of the first sentence, which boils down to:

59% of consumers don't care about interest, that same 59% of consumers don't want to use cash or check.

I got it down to B and E and according to the text, both considerations are of equal importance according to the simple statistics of this study. So why is everyone saying the question so obviously only cares about the first clause of the first sentence?

At the end of the day it doesn't really matter because the "most intense" component is what makes E less attractive, I just want to make sure I am not missing something.

[ganbayou]

I also have a question between B and E.
At first, I thought since to avoid using cash and checks, they use the card. The companies tries to improve services to win the competition.
Thus, I thought they focus on those places where accept card and improve the service there to get more consumers who use card.
Why is this wrong?

I actually could not see B is the conclusion of the statement immediately...

[ohthatpatrick]

Yeah B vs. E is tough.

In terms of better anticipating the real answer, when we read the 2nd sentence, we should try to integrate it with what we were told in the 1st, since a Logical Completion is essentially testing us on our ability to synthesize the two claims.

Companies want to improve the services their customers are most interested in.

We should immediately be asking ourselves, "What services are customers most interested in?"

As people have noted, the 1st sentence tells us that most customers
ARE NOT interested in interest rates
and
ARE interested in using credit cards as a replacement for cash/check

So that's where (B) and (E) get their support.

Ultimately, you pick based on strength of language. This is, at heart, an Inference question. We don't want to go overboard. We want the most supportable claim.

It seems very reasonable that companies would want to boast that "you can use our card as a replacement for cash/check at more places than any other card".

But there's no support for the idea that this is the MOST intense competition.

Maybe the service customers are most interested in is actually an easy-to-use online billing interface. So perhaps the companies have their most intense competition trying to make better apps/websites than their competitors'.

(B) is a safer answer because we know most customers are not interested in the interest rates.

It's safer to say "they would NOT make ____ the MAIN selling point"
than it is to say "they WOULD make ____ the MOST INTENSE area of competition"

It's safer to say "i am NOT the most talented dancer in North America"
than it is to say "I AM the most talented dancer in North America"

[KenM242]

Now, since we know companies primarily care about improving services their customers are most interested in, and we know a majority of their customer must be most interested in using cards to avoid cash or checks, doesn't E extremely logically follow this train of thought?

It's not worded as nicely, and it wasn't my first guess, but I have never seen so much evidence for a supposed wrong answer before now. Please help me!

I cherry-picked between (B) and (E) and took the rotten one home.
But while reading your question, I arrived at a quite convincing logic. Convincing enough for me, at least.

While (B) uses only the ingredients offered within the stimulus, (E) scoops one from far far away. Some people call it 'out of scope' but I DESPISE it when someone offers that as an explanation. So here is the breakdown:

The key word is 'a leap too big from the premises', and [the most intense] and [the number of places] are the culprits, not because they're 'extreme words' or anything but they make the conclusion seem somewhat of a forced leap.

In completing the blank, addressing some ways to accommodate the consumers preference for convenience over interest rate would be golden but for fill in the blank question type (as opposed to assumption, weaken, strengthen types) it's better to collect words within the stimulus to form a conclusion.

Where (E) made a leap too big is that while it does address the issue of convenience over interest rate, it is also ever so slyly arguing (or asserting) that [consumers derive the most convenience from being able to use their cards at as many places as possible]. It is now 2018 and this seems like a primitive issue but back in the days when this was the issue, it is probably a very valid point. However, we don't care about the truth of the argument, we care about how well it is constructed. If the market analyst said (E) in the blank, he would have to give more proofs to say why it is 'the number of places' that is of the most importance, instead of several other things that consumers may care more about; obviously, he can't. Therefore, because he is arriving at a conclusion with an extra idea that is not supported in the stimulus given, which should be treated with caution.