Statistics from the National Booksellers Association indicate that during the last five years most bookstores have st...

shunhe on May 12, 2020

Hi @jingjingxiao11111@gmail.com,

Thanks for the question! So let’s take a look at this argument. We’re told that bookstores have been experiencing declining revenues from selling fiction, even though there are national campaigns encouraging people to read more fiction. The argument then concludes that those campaigns have been unsuccessful.

Now we’re asked to find something that weakens the argument, and there’s a number of possibilities we can prephrase. One, for example, could be that maybe fiction books are getting cheaper, and so the quantity of books could be increasing while the price is falling, leading to falling revenues. Another example could be that people aren’t getting their books from bookstores; they’re getting them from somewhere else. Maybe they’re buying them as pdfs online or buying them from Walmart or something.

Looking through the answer choices, (A) encapsulates this second possibility. Mail order book clubs (which are not bookstores) have been seeing a substantial growth in fiction sales. So even though bookstores aren’t selling as many books, that could be because more people are participating in these mail order book clubs and buying their fiction there. So there could still be an overall increase in the number of people reading fiction, if mail order book clubs have seen enough growth. And it gives us direct evidence for more people reading fiction.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.