Critical Reasoning

Dear Friends,

I was having problems in answering the following question.

Smithtown University's fund-raisers succeeded in getting donations from 80 percent of the
potential donors they contacted. This success rate, exceptionally high for university fundraisers,
does not indicate that they were doing a good job. On the contrary, since the people
most likely to donate are those who have donated in the past, good fund-raisers constantly try
less-likely prospects in an effort to expand the donor base. The high success rate shows
insufficient canvassing effort. Which of the following, if true, provides more support for
the argument?

A. Smithtown University's fund-raisers were successful in their contacts with potential donors who
had never given before about as frequently as were fund-raisers for other universities in their
contacts with such people.
B. This year the average size of the donations to Smithtown University from new donors when
the university's fund-raisers had contacted was larger than the average size of donations from
donors who had given to the university before.
C. This year most of the donations that came to Smithtown University from people who had
previously donated to it were made without the university's fund-raisers having made any
contact with the donors.
D. The majority of the donations that fund-raisers succeeded in getting for Smithtown University
this year were from donors who had never given to the university before.
E. More than half of the money raised by Smithtown University's fund-raisers came from donors
who had never previously donated to the university.


Please help.

OA after some discussions.

Regards
Deano.

is A the correct option ?

Yes.. Even I think A is the only correct option since it is the only options that ensures that donation from Past donors accounted for most of the donations. A basically says that the success rate of other fund raising campaigns , as far as new donors are concerned, were the same as those for Smithtown University's fund-raisers. This would lead to the fact that the unusually high figure would mostly account for donations from past donors and thus strengthen the argument.

OA is option A but I am still not clear. Can anyone explain in more detail why option C and option E are incorrect?

C. This year most of the donations that came to Smithtown University from people who had
previously donated to it were made without the university's fund-raisers having made any
contact with the donors.

This is clearly out of scope because discussion is about fund-raisers having made contact with donors. It does not strengthen or weaken the fact that canvassing effort was not present if we talk about donors who were never contacted.

E. More than half of the money raised by Smithtown University's fund-raisers came from donors
who had never previously donated to the university.

Argument is discussion about number of donors contacted and whether what portion of them were previous donors. Assume that 200 donors gave 1 dollar each and they were donating previously and 400 persons who were not contacted previously gave 250 dollars in total (more than half the money raised). Does the amount of money in any way tell how many were contacted and how many were not. You can take any example as above to Strengthen or Weaken it. Since, it is possible to Weaken it as shown above, it is not correct.[/spoiler]

I posted an explanation here:

https://www.beatthegmat.com/smithtown-t66628.html