Factory manager: One reason the automobile parts this factory produces are expensive is that our manufacturing equip...

Katherine on December 24, 2018

Hi @jsmart3211, happy to help.

In the passage, the factory manager says that one reason the products made in his factory are expensive is because the equipment he uses is outdated. With better equipment, they would be able to produce more competitively priced products. He concludes that in order to make more competitively priced products, he must replace the factory equipment.

Answer B is correct because the factory owner shifts without justification from treating buying new equipment as one way of producing cheaper products to treating it as the only way. He doesn’t consider that there may be other measures he could take to produce cheaper products, such as finding less expensive source material. Instead, he says that in order to make the products more competitively priced, they must replace the factory equipment. Without justification, he treats one solution as the only solution.

Answer C says that the factory owner’s argument is flawed because he argues one thing is the cause of another when, in fact, evidence suggests that the second thing is really the cause of the first. The factory owner does believe that one reason his products are expensive is the outdated equipment. By saying “one reason,” he suggests that the equipment is one of several causes. However, in order for Answer C to be correct, there would need to be evidence that supports the reverse of this causal relationship. Here, the evidence does not suggest that the factory equipment is outdated because the products are expensive. Because there is no evidence that indicates the reverse of the factory owner’s causal argument, Answer C is the incorrect choice.