Critical Reasoning

Among the more effective kinds of publicity that publishers can get for a new book is to have excerpts of it published in a high-circulation magazine soon before the book is published. The benefits of such excerption include not only a sure increase in sales but also a fee paid by the magazine to the book's publisher.

Which of the following conclusions is best supported by the information above?

(A) The number of people for whom seeing an excerpt of a book in a magazine provides an adequate substitute for reading the whole book is smaller than the number for whom the excerpt stimulates a desire to read the book.

(B) Because the financial advantage of excerpting a new book in a magazine usually accrues to the book's publisher, magazine editors are unwilling to publish excerpts from new books.

(C) In calculating the total number of copies that a book has sold, publishers include sales of copies of magazines that featured an excerpt of the book.

(D) The effectiveness of having excerpts of a book published in a magazine, measured in terms of increased sales of a book, is proportional to the circulation of the magazine in which the excerpts are published.

(E) Books that are suitable for excerpting in high-circulation magazines sell more copies than books that are not suitable for excerpting.

This is an inference question (a Q that asks to find the answer that is supported by the passage or asks to draw a conclusion). The right answer to an inference question is one that can be proven (or most nearly proven) from the provided premises alone (there should be no need to introduce substantial assumptions to draw the inference).

The answer is A. I go through the question in detail in the full solution below (taken from the GMATFix App).



-Patrick