Q15 - Journalist: Despite the recent spate of

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Necessary Assumption

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: Likely that incumbent party will retain power after the upcoming elections.

Evidence: Voter confidence in the economy tends to lead to incumbent victories, and (Subsidiary Conclusion:) investors are confident in the economy, since they're putting money into stocks.

Answer Anticipation:
These answer choices could potentially speak to the assumption being made going from sentence 1 to sentence 2. Or they could be focused on an assumption being made going to the main conclusion.

By going from "many investors are putting money into stocks" to "these investors are confident of increased growth", we have the assumption: "if you put money into stocks, you're confident in economic growth".

By going from "these investors are confident in economic growth" to "voter confidence in the economy favors incumbents", we're assuming: "if some investors are confident in economic growth, then there is voter confidence in the economy".

Finally, we're assuming there is NOT something about the party now in power that would make it a likely exception to the rule that economic confidence would lead to incumbent victories (f.e. maybe the party in power has been unusually authoritarian or corrupt and voters care more about voting them out than they do sustaining the good economy).

Correct Answer:
C

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) "Major factor" is loaded language, so a red flag. We never discussed "the economic policies pursued by the govt", so this seems extraneous.

(B) This is in the realm of "if investors are confident in the economy then voters are confident in the economy", but this answer would be saying that "putting their money into stocks reflects their political preferences", which sounds a little absurd and not necessary to this argument.

(C) YES, this gets at the gap between "if investors are confident in the economy, then voters are confident from the economy". It also has the lovable word "not", which is in tons of correct Necessary Assumption answers. If we negate this, it says "the economic attitudes of investors differ greatly from those of voters in general", which badly weakens the move the argument is making from 2nd sentence to the beginning of the 3rd sentence.

(D) This goes against the gist, which is that voters tend to look at a good economy and reward the current administration, not credit previous administrations.

(E) There's no distinction in the argument between parties / individual politicians, so this seems extraneous.

Takeaway/Pattern: It seems like LSAC tried to hide the term shift by drawing our eyes into the connection between sentence 1 and 2 (with "clearly") and between the Since premise-half and Thus conclusion-half of the final sentence. Meanwhile, they're testing the move from "investors are confident" to "voters are confident". If we methodically take a 2nd lap through the author's ideas and think about what's being assumed from claim to claim, we can see the lack of a direct link between "investors are confident" and "voters are confident". We could also just steal this on the backend, by avoiding new ideas (economic policies / previous governments / individual politicians) and by negating answers that are ruling out, such as (C).

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