Skip to Main Content

PrepTest 73, Logical Reasoning 2, Question 12

Transcript

Question 12, this question asks for something that is most strongly supported by the information we've been given, which marks it as an inference question. With inference questions, our job is to catalog the information we've been given, and then find something in the answers that we can prove with that information. This question has a lot of information to catalog, and it can be a little bit overwhelming.

The first thing they tell us is that last year, worldwide, more books were sold than in any previous year. Second fact, in particular, there were more cookbooks sold last year than in any previous year. Third fact, for the first time ever, most of the cookbooks sold were not intended for beginners.

And indeed, more cookbooks than ever were purchased by professional cooks. And finally, one of the few books available on every continent is a cookbook that was written for beginners called Problem-Free Cooking. So with all that information, we're gonna be careful as we go into the answer choices, and we're only gonna pick things that we can absolutely prove from what we've been told.

Answer choice A, which says that last year, there were more cookbooks sold that were not intended for beginners than in any previous year. Now, this is something that we can prove. First, start with the fact that says that, last year, more cookbooks were sold than ever before. So the number of cookbooks being sold is bigger than it's ever been.

And for the first time ever, most of the cookbooks weren't intended for beginners. So last year, the percentage of cookbooks not intended for beginners was bigger than it had ever been, cuz it had never been up to 50% plus 1, up to the majority. So if the number of cookbooks sold is going up and the percentage of those books that are aimed at people who aren't beginners is going up, a bigger percentage of a bigger whole has to be bigger overall.

So answer choice A is something we can prove. So why are the other answers wrong? On the day of the test, with all this information, you would probably just do a courtesy glance to the other answers because we do have to move on, but let's see. Answer choice B, so Problem-Free Cooking is going to be one of the major problems in the answer choices here.

All we know about Problem-Free Cooking is that it's available on every continent. So I don't know that it was the bestselling cookbook last year. I just know that it was available on every continent. So I don't know if the bestselling cookbook was Problem-Free Cooking or not, it was just available in lots of places. Answer choice C, sales of cookbooks intended for beginners were lower last year than in previous years.

Now be careful, they told us that the percentage of cookbooks sold to beginners is going down, not that the total number of cookbooks sold to beginners is going down. A smaller percentage doesn't mean a smaller number if the whole that you're taking the percentage out of is going up. So answer choice D, most of the cookbooks last year that weren't intended for beginners were purchased by professional cooks.

We know that more cookbooks than ever were purchased by professional cooks. I don't know that that was the majority of the non-beginner books. So answer choice E, this is Problem-Free Cooking, again, our problem. We don't know that it sold more copies last year. We know that it was available on every continent. Who knows how popular it actually was sales-wise?

So the correct answer is answer choice A.

Read full transcript