Manager: This company's supply chain will develop significant weaknesses unless we make changes to our vendor contrac...

Annie on January 12, 2020

Hi @Travis,

This question is asking you to pinpoint the conclusion in the argument. The manager starts off by stating that they need to make changes to the company's supply chain now. Then says that some will argue against this because it's not necessary at this moment, and provides an example of a financial planner where waiting to make changes would be a bad idea.

The hard part of this question is that no single sentence is the conclusion, rather you need to combine ideas from a few of them to reach its ultimate conclusion.

Answer (B) does this. It combines the managers recommendation that changes need to be made now, with the lesson from the example that waiting to make changes is not a good idea. This is the ultimate conclusion of the argument because it uses both the recommendation (the clearest conclusion to the argument) and the explanation of the recommendation.

Answer (C) is incorrect because it only focuses on the managers recommendation and fails to consider the argument as a whole. I imagine this one tripped you up because you were looking to pinpoint a single sentence in the argument which was the conclusion. The question asks you to find the answer choice which "most accurately expresses the overall conclusion," which means you can look to the overall argument not just one sentence.