Critical Reasoning

It was feared that, with the development of online securities trading, people would no longer seek the trading services of traditional financial advisors. This, in turn, would cause economic hardship among established financial advisors.

Wich of the following, if true, would most weaken the predicted implications of online securities trading described?
Choices
A
The fees for online trading services are typically 80 percent of those for traditional financial advisors.
B
Online securities trading companies are working to enhance security, a key concern for their customers.
C
In an effort to increase productivity, many traditional financial advisors have sought online trading capabilities at their offices.
D
Most of the people interested in online trading services would not have sought the services of traditional financial advisors anyway.
E
The inflation-adjusted average income for traditional financial advisors has decreased slightly in the last decade.

i'd go with A here. what's the oa and source?

OA D
source grockit

i would've gone with D had they not used the word "most". maybe an instructor can clarify.

"Most" is acceptable here.

I know that you would prefer to see "all" right? As in "All of the people who are interested in online trading services would not have sought the services of traditional financial advisers anyway."

But remember that it does not have to render the conclusion completely worthless right? It just needs to cause the conclusion to tend to be less likely. Well, if most people were never customers anyway that would tend to mean that financial hardship may not occur.

A is not bad either, but you have to make a fairly big assumption here which is that 80% is not low enough to attract lots of people right?

I think that we can support D on this one...what do you guys think?

Hi David,

The question stem says which of the following would MOST weaken the argument. if i recall correctly most on gmat means more than 50%..so in this case it could be as low as 50.0000000001% - a percentage that would not MOST weaken the given scenario...for the MOST weaken scenario we'd have to assume a really high percentage or does it not matter? your thoughts?

agreed, we have to make an assumption for choice A to be true but I think D is not air tight either.


Thanks!

ice_rush - That is true.

The only way to see if this is a fair question would be to see the statistics on it. That is the great thing about the Veritas Prep Free Question Bank. You can see which answers are chosen the most and we could see if this is a valid question.

For this one I agree that if you lose some large portion - up to 49% of your business in choice D then you might be in "financial trouble."