FM station - tough one...

[nervesofsteel]

Every week, the programming office at an FM radio station reviewed unsolicited letters from listeners who were expressing comments on the station’s programs. One week, the station received 50 letters with favorable comments about the station’s news reporting and music selection and 10 letters with unfavorable comments on the station’s new movie review segment of the evening program. Faced with this information, the programming director assumed that if some listeners did not like the movie review segment, then there must be other listeners who did like it. Therefore, he decided to continue the movie review segment of the evening program.
Which on e of the following identifies a problem with the programming director’s decision process?
(A) He failed to recognize that people are more likely to write letters of criticism than of praise.
(B) He could not properly infer from the fact that some listeners did not like the movie review segment that some others did.
(C) He failed to take into consideration the discrepancy in numbers between favorable and unfavorable letters received.
(D) He failed to take into account the relation existing between the movie review segment and the news.
(E) He did not wait until he received at least 50 letters with unfavorable comments about the movie review segment before making his decision


OA B

[DanaJ]

A. actually supports the conclusion, since if people are more likely to write letters of criticism than of praise, the 10 letter could only be a disgruntled few.

B. is the correct answer here. Indeed, there's absolutely no grounds for him to draw the conclusion based on the info.

C. The discrepancy is irrelevant, since the positive reviews concerned different segments of the program.

D. This relation is not stated or discussed anywhere in the question.

E. While I almost fell for this one, here's why it's wrong: 50 letters is not defined anywhere in the argument as being a "magical number", i.e. there's no official significance to it. They did receive 50 praise letters, but that's just happenstance.

[joseph32]

Guys can anyone give a decent reason why B is not right.