Q7 - A certain retailer promotes merchandise

[rsmorale]

Can someone help me figure out what makes B wrong, and D right?

[patrice.antoine]

I'll try and tackle:

B is wrong because it's a could be true. It CBT that if there is no holiday sale being run that it is the month of August, but it could also be true for any of the other months, too.

It also incorrectly reverses what the stimulus is saying:

Stimulus
August --> ~holiday & ~excess merchandise
Holiday or excess merchandise --> ~ August

Holiday --> Holiday Sale
~holiday sale --> ~holiday

Answer choice B:
~holiday sale --> August

There is no way in which we can come to Answer choice B given the chain of conditionals.


D is the credited response because of the first sentence of the prompt: "at all times..." there is either a manager's sale or a holiday sale and we know that each sale runs one full calendar month. D captures this precisely with saying that if there is not a manager's sale then we know there must be a holiday sale.

Hope this helps!!

[maryadkins]

Nice explanation! Hopefully that helped clarify.

Just to break it down a little further, there are a couple of conditional logic statements in this question that 4 of the answer choices play on. The right answer, (D), ends up hinging on the rule that there is always a sale going on--holiday or manager's. The others are false inferences based on the two conditional logic statements in the argument:

1. If Manager wishes --> Manager's Sale (Contrapositive: If there's no Manager's Sale --> Manager hasn't wished for one)

2. If a holiday falls in the month AND if excess merchandise --> Holiday Sale (Contrapositive: If there's no Holiday Sale --> Holiday hasn't fallen in the month OR there's no excess merchandise)

3. If it's August --> No holiday + no extra merchandise (Contrapositive: If holiday OR extra merchandise --> Not August)

Remember that we can only read left to right to draw conclusions based on these--never try to move against the arrow.

(A) cannot be concluded based on any of these or its contrapositive. We aren't told what happens if a holiday falls in a month but there's no extra merch.
(B) says if there's no Holiday Sale --> August. This misreads the 3rd statement above.
(C) also can't be inferred.
(E) also misreads the 3rd statement above. If it's August, we know there's no excess merch, but not vice versa. There could be excess merch in other months, too.

[rsmorale]

Thanks, all!