Q10 - Last year the total

[schwingrocker]

Could someone explain this question please!

[ohthatpatrick]

The first thing we have to do for a Weaken question such as this is to find the conclusion:

Conc: The desirability of our meals to consumers has clearly decreased

why?

Prem: For every one of our restaurants that was in operation last year and this year, more meals were sold last year.

====
Our job, since this is a Weaken question, is to think to ourselves, "How could I argue that the desirability of the meals has NOT decreased, even though I have to accept that more meals were sold last year than this year?"
====

This is what I would call a Causal/Explanation type argument. The accountant is looking at a statistic - fewer meals are being sold this year - and asking, "Why?"

He theorizes that the cause/explanation of this decline is that "consumers now find our meals less desirable" than before.

When LSAT authors try to sell us on a potential cause/explanation for a given phenomenon/statistic, our job as test takers is to consider alternative causes or explanations for the given phenomenon/statistic.

So, really, as I go to these answers, I'm thinking, "Which of these answers is going to give me a DIFFERENT way to explain why people are buying fewer meals this year?"

(E) is the correct answer because it supplies us with the alternative explanation we were looking for. "Oh, it's not that the meals are less desirable to consumers this year, what's really happening is that consumers in these areas are economically suffering so they're forced to cut back on eating out. THAT'S why these restaurants are selling fewer meals."

===other answers===

(A) could potentially strengthen the idea that consumers no longer find the meals as desirable, since it tells us that the menu has changed from last year.

(B) "Prior to last year" indicates that sales were going down 2 yrs. ago. But it doesn't indicate that last year and this year are all part of the same downward trend. Additionally, it doesn't give us an alternative explanation for that trend. It could be that this overall downward trend is from declining desirability.

(C) This doesn't address the accountant's statistic, which is the phenomenon we're trying to explain. ALL the restaurants that existed last year sold fewer meals. This tells us, for restaurants whose sales went up, what WASN'T the cause. We want to know, for restaurants whose meal totals went down, was WAS the cause.

(D) Has basically the same issues as (C).

Hope this helps.