Thanks for the question! Sometimes you just need to see different explanations until one clicks. First, let me summarize the premises of the argument, which will help us distill the point it's trying to make.
P1) Decreasing % money spent on standard methods (effective) P2) Increasing % money spent on nonstandard methods (ineffective)
Conclusion: Less money is being spent now on effective treatments of disease X.
We're looking for an assumption that will help us properly conclude this conclusion based on the given premises. Notice that we're given premises about percentages, but we make a conclusion about an absolute amount of money. If we spent $100 on treating X ten years ago, with 90% going towards standard (effective) methods and 10% to nonstandard (ineffective) methods, we'd be allocating $90 to standard and $10 to nonstandard in total. But if nowadays, we're spending $1000 on treating X with 50% allocated to each kind of treatment, we're spending $500 on both, and that would mean we're spending more total money on effective treatments of disease X, even though we're spending more proportionally on ineffective treatments. Thus, a likely candidate will tell us that the total amount of money being spent on X has either decreased, stayed the same, or increased by less than the difference in proportions (like if expenditures went up $1 and we went from 90% to 50% spent on standard methods in the earlier example). This is what (E) tells us, and so (E) is the correct answer. Hope this helps! If anything else is still confusing, feel free to ask.
Eva-ParonJune 15, 2020
Im not sure I understand. I thought a smaller % was being spent on the effective treatment (the standard methods) so wouldn't less money be spent? In your example, you said 90% going towards standard and 10% to non standard. why are we assuming that more is going towards standard treatment?
