September 2014 LSAT Section 4 Question 22

Advertising tends to have a greater influence on consumer preferences regarding brands of yogurt than it does on cons...

hannahnaylor5 on October 23, 2019

Why D?

I may be overthinking, but in reading the last part of the last sentence "sales of its store-brand milk increased more than sales of its store-brand yogurt," I didn't take this to mean that sales of yogurt decreased necessarily (which is why I didn't choose D), but rather that the sales of milk increased more than the sales of yogurt did (which is what is says). Yogurt sales didn't have to be decreasing for milk sales to be increasing more than the yogurt sales. For example, let's say they only sold 10 cartons of milk before and 25 cups of yogurt, and after the advertising sold 20 cartons of milk and 26 cups of yogurt. Obviously the % increase of milk is more, but yogurt sales didn't necessarily decline. Am I wrong in this reasoning?

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Irina on October 24, 2019

@hannahnaylor5,

You are correct in your interpretation of the stimulus, but this is a resolve the paradox question, so we are looking for an answer choice that would explain the discrepancy. We are told that advertising commonly results in yogurt sales increasing more than the milk sales, it is entirely plausible that both yogurt and milk sales increase but yogurts % increase is typically higher. The store in question ran an advertising campaign but its sales of milk increased more than its sales of yogurt. How do we explain it?

(D) is saying that yogurt sales nationwide have decreased recently, thus suggesting that even though advertising most likely offset some of that decline, it resulted in lower than usual % increase in yogurt sales. (D) talks about a nationwide trend, not that the sales of yogurt decreased at that particular store, thus it is consistent with the last sentence in the stimulus. Yogurt sales would have dropped but for the advertising, advertising still resulted in some increase in sales but not as large as expected.

Let me know if this helps and if you have any further questions.