Critical Reasoning Jamboree

Okay, our goal at PrivateTutoringAtHome.com is to help parents, students, and tutors alike be super successful. We know many of you are shaking in your boots as you prepare for the ACT and SAT and GED and GMAT and LSAT, and any other acronym standardized test you can think of.

So, in honor of the standardized test, we’ll be posting 1 question and answer this whole month and the focus will be on critical reasoning. Deal? Good. So join us daily for some seriously yummy critical reasoning buffet.

Critical Reasoning Question 1

In Los Angeles, a political candidate who buys saturation radio advertising will get maximum name recognition.

The statement above logically conveys which of the following?

A. Radio advertising is the most important factor in political campaigns in Los Angeles.

B. Maximum name recognition in Los Angeles will help a candidate to win a higher percentage of votes cast in the city.

C. Saturation radio advertising reaches every demographically distinct sector of the voting population in Los Angeles.

D. For maximum name recognition a candidate need not spend on media channels other than radio advertising.

E. A candidate’s record of achievement in the Los Angeles area will do little to affect his or her name recognition there.

Think you know the answer?

The correct answer is D. An L.A. political candidate who buys saturation radio advertising will get maximum name recognition. In other words, such advertising is sufficient for maximum name recognition. If so, then is must be true that, as (D) says, a candidate can get such recognition without spending on other forms of media.

(A) suggests that radio advertising is the most important factor in L.A. political campaigns, but nothing like this was mentioned in the stimulus, so it’s not something that you can infer. Nor were we told the specific results of attaining a maximum name recognition, so (B) is out. Similarly, we don’t know precisely what is meant by “saturation radio advertising,” so we can’t infer anything as detailed as (C). Finally, although we know saturation radio advertising is sufficient for getting maximum name recognition, we can’t infer that other things, such as candidate’s record mentioned in (E), have little effect on name recognition.

When I answered this question, I thought the answer was either B or C. Knowing both these answers were incorrect, helps me to understand that I need to work on assuming details not given.