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CR With a Kool Refrigerator

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by camitava » Sat Feb 08, 2014 8:07 pm
The reason much refrigerated food spoils is that it ends up out of sight at the back of the shelf. So why not have round shelves that rotate? Because such rotating shelves would have just the same sort of drawback, since things would fall off the shelves' edges into the rear corners. Which of the following is presupposed in the argument against introducing rotating shelves?

(A) Refrigerators would not be made so that their interior space is cylindrical.
(B) Refrigerators would not be made to have a window in front for easy viewing of their contents without opening the door.
(C) The problem of spoilage of refrigerated food is not amenable to any solution based on design changes.
(D) Refrigerators are so well designed that there are bound to be drawbacks to any design change.
(E) Rotating shelves would be designed to rotate only while the refrigerator door was open.

In this CR,the author already described the disadvantage of having circular shelf. He rejected the plan to have a circular shelf in refrigerator because the food would rot despite of having suitable shelf design. Having a circular shelf would also not help much to save the foods. Now, how come the author presupposed that the refrigerator could not be made with cylindrical inferior space.
To me, the choice C appears to be correct as it was saying that spoilage of food does not depend upon the shape of the shelf.
Correct me If I am wrong


Regards,

Amitava
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Source: — Critical Reasoning |

by Bill@VeritasPrep » Sat Feb 08, 2014 8:30 pm
The thing that jumped out to me when reading the stimulus is that there are corners for things to fall into. If the shelves are round, why wouldn't you make the fridge round to accommodate them? No corners = no items falling.

A fits with this perfectly. The only way items can fall into corners is if the fridge still has corners.

B does not matter. A window has nothing to do with items falling into corners.

In C, "any solution" is far too broad. The author is attacking one solution, but that does not mean the author assumes that there are no solutions to food spoilage.

D is too broad; we aren't terribly concerned with drawbacks besides food spoilage.

E would not affect items falling off of the shelves.
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by camitava » Mon Feb 10, 2014 1:33 am
To understand the entire argument and your solution, took me one and half day time. How dumb am I? Uffffh! I pre-assumed that rotating shelves would also keep the items on the back and the foods on the back would be spoiled. Now when I looked at the argument, I realized where my fault is. Thanks Bill once again for your explanation.
Correct me If I am wrong


Regards,

Amitava
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by Bill@VeritasPrep » Mon Feb 10, 2014 12:21 pm
No, not dumb! This one is tricky. I showed it to one of my tutoring students who is consistently scoring in the low 700s, and he struggled with it as well.

I find the negation technique to be very useful on questions like this. Since an assumption MUST be true for the argument to work, ask "well, what if this is NOT true?"

For choice A, you'd go from "Refrigerators would not be made cylindrical" to "well, what if refrigerators WERE made cylindrical?" And now you see that the corner argument fails because there are no corners.
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