Critical Reasoning (CR) | Re: The government has recently implemented a new educational policy aimed

Hmm, this isn't a very tight question. I wonder what the source is.

In general, we can weaken a causal argument by suggesting an alternative cause or by weakening the plausibility of the proposed cause. So in this case, we could say that something else caused the increase in reading scores, or we can give some reason that the government program is not likely to have done so.

B is going the first route. The trouble is that it just says "many schools" had increased hours. Is that 10% of schools? 60%? And we don't know if they had increased hours as much as the policy mandates, or even if they increased hours in anticipation of the policy. What it comes down to is that the policy could still easily have driven the increase. After all, we wouldn't say that an advertising campaign didn't work just because the brand was getting more popular *before* the campaign.

C is going the second route, by suggesting that some other unknown factor must be driving the increase. The GMAT
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Statistics : Posted by DmitryFarber • on 12 Mar 2024, 23:54 • Replies 2 • Views 265

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