When the manufacturers in a given country are slower to adopt new technologies than their foreign competitors are, th...
eli918April 16, 2020
Transitive Was not applied
Hello,
In the explanation of the video, she kept saying it does not follow. However, B follows if you use transitive properties with the contrapositives... Am I wrong? If so, where am I wrong in regards to that? E as an answer just does not make sense to me as it also used transitive properties in the video explanation with the contrapositive with more assumptions as nothing is mentioned in the question stem regarding at least the same or adopting at a faster rate. Thank you for your help.
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Thanks for the question! Let’s take a look at the stimulus. We’re told that when manufacturers in a given country are slower to adopt new technologies than foreign competitors, their production costs will fall more slowly. If the production costs fall more slowly (which means the same thing as less rapidly), then manufacturers won’t be able to lower prices as rapidly. When a country’s manufacturers can’t lower their prices as rapidly, then the country gets squeezed out of the global market. Let’s try to diagram all of this:
SANT = Slower to adopt new technologies PCFMS = production costs fall more slowly MLPR = Manufacturers can lower prices as rapidly CSGM = country squeezed out of the global market
SANT —> PCFMS PCFMS —> ~MLPR ~MLPR —> CSGM
And so we can see that we can string these all together to get
SANT —> PCFMS —> ~MLPR —> CSGM
First, let’s take a look at (B). Unfortunately, you can’t get anywhere with (B) using contrapositives. Remember when we take the contrapositive that we have to negate the original statement. So in order to get anywhere with B, it would have to start with ~CSGM, or a case in which a country was not squeezed out of the global market. But (B) starts with countries being squeezed out of the global market, so we can’t do anything with contrapositives with it, and so (B) is wrong.
Now let’s take a look at (E). (E) tells us that if country’s manufacturers can lower their prices as rapidly as foreign competitors can, then they adopt new technology at least as fast as foreign competitors do. So (E) basically says
MLPR —> ~SANT
And we can see that we can conclude that from the chain above, since
MLPR —> ~PCFMS —> ~SANT
and if the country is not slower to adopt new technologies, then it must be adopting new technology at least as fast as foreign competitors. This is just based on what it means to not be slower: the same speed, or faster.
Hope this helps. Feel free to ask any further questions that you might have.
