People who have habitually slept less than six hours a night and then begin sleeping eight or more hours a night typi...

shunhe on August 21, 2020

Hi @liwenong28,

Thanks for the question! So let’s take a look at what’s going on here in the argument to understand its reasoning. We’re basically being told that people who habitually sleep less than six hours a night and then start to sleep eight or more feel much less anxious. So, the argument concludes, most people who sleep less than 6 hours a night can probably cause their anxiety levels to fall if they sleep at least 8 hours a night.

So what exactly is the reasoning going on here? How can we abstract it to apply it to other situations? Well, it’s basically that people who normally do one thing, but make a change and start doing something else, will have some effect follow. So most people who do that thing can probably make the effect follow by starting to do the second thing.

So now what parallels that reasoning? Well, let’s take a look at (A). People (in this case small companies) who normally do one thing (not advertise on the internet) start doing something else (advertise on the internet), they have some effect follow (financial situation generally improving). So, the argument concludes, most people who do that thing (small companies that don’t advertise on the internet) can probably make the effect follow (improving their financial situation) by doing the second thing (or “doing so” in this answer choice). That parallels the stimulus exactly, making (A) the correct answer choice.

Now let’s take a look at (B), which tells us that certain small companies that had never previously advertised on the Internet have found that their financial situations began to improve after doing so. So most small companies can probably improve their financial situations by starting to advertise on the internet. But first of all, there’s no singling out of “certain” people like there is “certain” companies here in the original stimulus. Second of all, this is missing the “small companies that don’t already advertise on the internet” part, which is present in (A) and the original stimulus. For these reasons, (B) is wrong.

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