As part of a survey, approximately 10,000 randomly selected individuals were telephoned and asked a number of questio...

shunhe on August 26, 2020

Hi @maonuo,

Thanks for the question! So we’re being told here that there’s this survey.. And in it, there’s 10k people asked about their income and savings. Now, the older the person was, the more likely it was that they wouldn’t answer the questions. So, the argument concludes that generally, people are more willing when younger than older to reveal personal financial information to strangers over the telephone.

Now we need to find a flaw in the argument. Well, what could the flaw be? One thing that comes to mind is that there’s no reason to think that this is a phenomenon limited to financial information over telephones; it might just be that they’re less likely to reveal information in general. So let’s take a look at (E), which tells us that the argument provides no reason to believe that what’s true of a given age group in general is true of all individuals within that age group. But the argument doesn’t need to make us believe that. The argument is making a conclusion about the age group, and not all the individuals in that age group. So this can’t be the flaw. (A), on the other hand, gets at what we were looking for. Maybe it’s just that instead of a person being less likely to give out the information when they’re older, it’s actually just particular features of certain generations. So we don’t know that the same individual would’ve answered differently, since we’re asking different individuals from different age groups (as opposed to one person when they’re young and then the same person again when they’re old). So (A) points out the flaw and is the answer.

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