Q25 - Babson: The idea of charging people a dollar to read

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
ID the Disagreement

Stimulus Breakdown:
B: Charging $1 / article online could work if the articles are high quality. It's common to tip even more than a dollar for good service.

C: People usually just tip for services known for receiving tips. Articles aren't currently something you pay for individually, so writers hoping to earn money through this $1 / article model could be disappointed.

Answer Anticipation:
Where is the closest thing to an explicit claim vs. claim disagreement?

B says "charging $1 per article will succeed, if the articles are high quality", while C says, "bad sign for anyone hoping to earn money this way". So there's a definite disagreement in terms of optimism / pessimism regarding whether people will pay $1 an article.

There seems to also be a layer of disagreement under the surface, relating to WHY one is optimistic and the other is pessimistic. B seems to think that people would be comfortable "tipping" $1 for a good article, while C thinks people would find it weird to "tip" on an article.

Correct Answer:
D

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) This is way too broad and universal. Also they would both probably agree with this.

(B) C never addresses anything relating to a distinction between countries where tipping is customary and countries where it isn't. He brings up services for which it's customary to tip vs. services for which it's not. But he has no stated opinion on the claim (B) makes.

(C) Maybe, but this is phrased so weakly that no one would ever want to disagree with it. Who is willing to say, "It is impossible to write articles such that even one person would be willing to pay a dollar, in a society that doesn't normally tip on an article"? We can support that B would agree with this answer, but it's hard to say C would oppose it, because he's speaking in fuzzier terms that "on the whole, people aren't used to this, and it's not a great money-making idea".

(D) YES. This actually gets at both layers of disagreement we observed: whether or not it would succeed as a money making venture and how that relates to people's tipping attitudes. B would agree with this and C would oppose it.

(E) They can both agree that people would find it a NOVEL (i.e. "new") idea. That has nothing to do with whether people would be willing to go along with the idea.

Takeaway/Pattern: Often, on these ID the Disagreement questions, if the disagreement is too obvious and high level, the correct answer deals with WHY the authors came to their opposing conclusions. To protect ourselves against picking answer like (C), we need to always think about "Can I infer that one author would endorse this? Can I infer that the other author would endorse the contradiction of this?" If a claim is phrased very weakly, then contradicting it is holding a very EXTREME position.

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