Fremont: Simpson is not a viable candidate for chief executive of Pod Oil because he has no background in the oil ind...

shunhe on June 23, 2020

Hi @Skyler-Simon,

Thanks for the question! So let’s remember what’s going on in the example here. Galindo is disagreeing with Fremont, and saying that an oil industry background doesn’t guarantee success. Then, Galindo points to Pod Oil’s last chief executive, who had oil industry experience but almost led the company to bankruptcy.

Now we want to know how Galindo’s argument is flawed. (E) tells us that it presents only one instance of a phenomenon as the basis for a broad generalization about that phenomenon. Remember that the entire answer choice has to be right for it to be the correct answer choice. The first half is certainly true; Galindo points to one instance of a phenomenon (Pod Oil’s last chief executive). But now we turn our attention to the second part. Is a broad generalization about that phenomenon being made? No. And to understand this, we have to go back to Galindo’s original claim, which is just that “oil industry background doesn’t guarantee success.” How can we prove the claim? All we need is one example of someone with an oil industry background not having success to show that an oil industry background doesn’t GUARANTEE success. It would definitely be a broad generalization to say, based on one example, that having such a background does guarantee success. But here, the opposite is being down; Galindo is just trying to show that it’s a possibility that you can have an oil industry background, and not have success. For that, you only need to have one example. So this isn’t a flaw in the reasoning, and so (E) isn’t the correct answer.

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