A report of a government survey concluded that Center City was among the ten cities in the nation with the highest dropout rate from its schools. The survey data were obtained by asking all city residents over the age of 19 whether they were high school graduates and computing the proportion who were not. A city school official objected that the result did not seem accurate according to the schools’ figures.
The school official can most properly criticize the reasoning by which the survey report reached its result for failure to do which one of the following?
A taken into account instances of respondents’ dropping out that occurred before the respondents reached high school
B ask residents whether they had completed their high school work in fewer than the usual number of years.
C distinguish between residents who had attended the city’s schools and those who had received their schooling elsewhere
D predict the effect of the information contained in the report on future high school dropout rates for the city
E consider whether a diploma from the city’s high schools signaled the same level of achievement over time
A museum director, in order to finance expensive new acquisitions, discreetly sold some paintings by major artists. All of them were paintings that the director privately considered inferior. Critics roundly condemned the sale, charging that the museum had lost first-rate pieces, thereby violating its duty as a trustee of art future generations. A few months after being sold by the museum, those paintings were resold, in an otherwise stagnant art market, at two to three times the price paid to the museum. Clearly, their prices settle the issue, since they demonstrate the correctness of the critic’s evaluation.
The reasoning in the argument is vulnerable to the criticism that the argument does which one of the following?
A: it rejects a proven means of accomplishing an objective without offering any alternative means of accomplishing that objective.
