There are about 75 brands of microwave popcorn on the market; altogether, they account for a little over half of the ...
stefgonzAugust 16, 2017
Why not A?
I understand why B is the correct answer but I'm having trouble ruling out A. If A were true, wouldn't it create a false premise in the argument , because the "popularity of microwave popcorn" would be diminished by the popularity of conventional popcorn, as more than half of the people who buy popcorn would buy the latter?
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@stefgonz the problem with (A) is that you are ignoring that even if (A) is true, microwave popcorn still "account(s) for a little over half of the money from sales of microwave food products."
So for example, imagine our world had 10 popcorn purchasers and 6 of these people buy conventional popcorn rather than microwave popcorn.
The 4 other people, however, are clearly buying a lot of microwave popcorn since microwave popcorn accounts for more than half of the money from sales of all microwave food products.
This is why (A) is incorrect.
Hope that helps! Please let us know if you have any other questions.
Yuer-WangSeptember 25, 2019
@Mehran so do you mean that (A) does not weaken the conclusion because it's irrelevant?
ShirnelMay 8, 2020
Is the answer to this user's Yuer question is:
because the argument is about the convenience of microwave popcorn being the cause that people pay a higher price as rather than the percentage of people that percentage of people since the argument doesn't tell us anything about the number of people?
Also is this correct answer considered to be an alternative cause to the effect of people paying a higher price.
MoradJune 17, 2020
I think you're right on that it is considered an alternative cause. Specifically, the passage says people are paying for more popcorn because of the convenience. Rather, answer choice (B) says that people are actually buying it because it less fattening which suggests an alternative cause and weakens the speaker's conclusion/argument.
Why answer choice (A) is incorrect is because it doesn't really matter how many people are buying it since the speaker never enumerates the amount of people purchasing and only uses the amount of sales of microwave products as evidence. They use the word choice "many" to represent the buyers of microwave popcorn, but that's subjective and "many" could actually mean "some" to the speaker, so at least one. For this reason, arguing that more people use conventional popcorn doesn't reduce the speaker's conclusion about there being "some" people who prefer convenience.
