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

Naz on September 22, 2015

The difference is that the passage and answer choice (A) use Sufficient & Necessary statements, e.g. if you are someone who has habitually slept less than six hours a night and then begin sleeping eight or more hours a night, then typically you begin to feel much less anxious, or if it is a small company that first begins to advertise on the internet, then its financial situation generally improves, whereas answer choice (B) uses quantifier statements, e.g. some small companies that have never previously advertised on the Internet have found that their financial situations began to improve after thy started to do so.

Hope that helps! Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Theresaturner on September 23, 2015

Thank you

alymathieu on December 28, 2018

I don't think it's clear that sufficient and necessary statements are used. I think there must be a better way to determine this answer, please have someone else reexplain this as I don't find this chain helpful whatsoever.

Ravi on December 29, 2018

@alymathieu,

Happy to help. The stimulus begins by telling us that people who have habitually slept less than six hours a night and then begin sleeping eight or more hours a night typically begin to feel much less anxious. This is a correlation.

Then, the argument concludes that most people who sleep less than six hours a night can probably cause their anxiety levels to fall by beginning to sleep at least eight hours a night.

This is a probabilistic causal conclusion, as it's saying that these people can probably cause their anxiety levels to go down by making a certain lifestyle change.

The basic structure of this argument: when people begin doing something that they've never done before, they tend to get a benefit from it. Therefore, most people in the same starting situation can probably derive a benefit from doing something that they've never done before.

Answer choice A exhibits the same argument structure that we see in the stimulus, so it's the correct answer. Like the people who had not been sleeping 8 or more hours but began feeling much anxious after doing so, the small company in A has never advertised on the web before but starts benefitting financially upon doing so. Also, "generally" in answer A mirrors "typically" in the stimulus. Then, just as how the stimulus concludes that most people who sleep less than six hours a night can probably cause their anxiety levels to fall by beginning to sleep at least eight hours a night, answer A concludes that most small companies that have never advertised on the Internet can probably improve their financial situation by doing so. Between the stimulus and answer A, "typically" lines up with "generally," "most" lines up with "most", and "can probably" lines up with "can probably." The structure of the stimulus and answer A mirror each other well.

Answer B sounds tempting if you don't read it carefully, but the clear mismatch occurs in the first word of B. "Certain" implies a small subset of small companies. This is the equivalent of a "some" statement and is a far more specific and limited subset of small companies. Unlike the stimulus and answer A, answer B does not establish a correlation with its first premise. Additionally, there is a problem with B's conclusion. B's conclusion states, "most small companies can probably improve their financial situations by starting to advertise on the Internet." However, there is no evidence presented that most of the companies in the conclusion of B never advertised on the Internet before. The author is making the assumption that they haven't, but we need this assumption to be stated as a condition that we can attribute to most small companies (the sentence's subject).

Does this make sense? Let us know if you have any more questions!

SarahA on May 26, 2019

Super helpful to see this broken down so clearly. Thank you!