Critical Reasoning

Press Secretary: Our critics claim that the president's recent highway project cancellations demonstrate a vindictive desire to punish legislative districts controlled by opposition parties. They offer as evidence the fact that 90 percent of the projects canceled were in such districts. But all of the canceled projects had been identified as wasteful in a report written by respected nonpartisan auditors. So the president's choice was clearly motivated by sound budgetary policy, not partisan politics.

Which of the following is an assumption on which the press secretary's argument depends?

(A) Canceling highway projects was not the only way for the president to punish legislative districts controlled by opposition parties.

(B) The scheduled highway projects identified as wasteful in the report were not mostly projects in districts controlled by the president's party.

(C) The number of projects canceled was a significant proportion of all the highway projects that were to be undertaken by the government in the near future.

(D) The highway projects canceled in districts controlled by the president's party were not generally more expensive than the projects cancelled in districts controlled by opposition parties.

(E) Reports by nonpartisan auditors are not generally regarded by the opposition parties as a source of objective assessments of government projects.

An assumption must be true for the conclusion to logically follow from the premises

Premise: 90% of cancelled projects were in opposition districts, but all cancelled projects had been identified as wasteful.

Conclusion: the cancellation was not motivated by a vindictiveness, but by sound budgetary policy

The right answer will likely make use of numbers based data since numbers were used to support the conclusion. to predict assumptions, ask yourself: "what would make this conclusion wrong? what is the author overlooking?" The full solution below is taken from the GMATFix App.



-Patrick

Sorry, I don't get it. How is choice B connected to budget? It olny deals with statistics, like choice C

Could you please explain this one more time.

Hi Olga,

The argument is not limited to the budget. The conclusion is about what motivated the President's decision; was it sound budgetary policy? or was it vindictive punishment?

The conclusion uses the "all cancelled projects were wasteful" line to claim that the motivation was strictly budgetary even though 90% of the cancellations were in opposition districts. By implying that the decisions on which projects to cancel were in line with the report on which projects were wasteful, this conclusion assumes that the President was fair. If the president were fair, we would expect that since 90% of the cancelled projects came from opposition districts, 90% of the wasteful projects were also from those districts.

Negation Test:
Because an assumption must be true for the conclusion to follow from the premises, one easy way to test whether a statement is an assumption is the negation test: negate the statement and consider how the conclusion is impacted. If the conclusion no longer makes sense given the premises, the statement was an assumption.

Let's negate B
Imagine a situation in which most of the wasteful projects are in the President's district (this negates B), but 90% of the cancellations are in opposition districts. This would mean that the president actually targeted opposition districts while leaving wasteful projects in his own districts untouched. Under this scenario, it no longer makes sense to conclude that the President's decision was clearly motivated by budgetary policy, not partisan politics.

Negating B makes the conclusion illogical (it no longer follows from the premises), so B must be an assumption.

Answer D:
How expensive the projects are is irrelevant. The argument is about wasteful projects, not expensive projects (a project can be expensive without being wasteful, so D doesn't give us any useful information)

I agree that B is the most relevant answer. Since all the cancelled projects are wasteful and 90% of cancelled are in opposition partie's districts, can't we safely assume that 90% of cancelled projects are wasteful?
I think the right answer would have been answer E negated. But we cannot select E since it states the opposite.
B would have been correct only if argument had stated that most of the cancelled were wasteful.