#10 - Some people argue that the government should

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Cannot Be True. The correct answer choice is (D).

Answer choice (A):

Answer choice (B):

Answer choice (C):

Answer choice (D): This is the correct answer choice.

Answer choice (E):

This explanation is still in progress. Please post any questions below!

[abares]

How do you know to assume that in answer d, "owned" means the same thing as "take over"?

Thanks,
Annie

[Laura Carrier]

Hi Annie,

You are quite right to suggest that “owned by” doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as “taken over by,” and it is an excellent sign that you are scrutinizing language so closely!

But notice, however, that in order to agree that answer choice (D) describes something that cannot be true if the facts asserted in the stimulus are true, you don’t actually need to believe that owning and taking over are the same actions. The columnist tells us that some people think that the government shouldn’t take over private banks because it can’t manage financial institutions. But the columnist then points out that the government wouldn’t actually need to manage the banks itself, but simply to appoint the right management people.

If this is true—which we must take it to be, since this is a Cannot Be True question where we accept the stimulus as true and use it to prove one of the answer choices impossible—then it should be possible for a bank taken over by the government to be well managed, regardless of whether the government itself could manage a bank. If we know that this is even a possibility, then we also know that it would be false to say that banks taken over by the government cannot be well managed.

When answer choice (D) changes taking over to owning, it is still describing something that we can know is false. If a bank that has been taken over by the government could be well managed by appointing the right people, than we can also infer that a bank that the government actually owns could also be well managed in the same way. As long as there is a possibility that a government-run bank could be well managed (whether it is owned by the government or simply taken over), it becomes necessarily false to say that such a bank cannot be well run.

I hope this clarifies things!
Laura

[jmramon]

Hi, Powerscore!

So I think I'm sort of understanding Laura's explanation, so thank you! However, I do want to get clarification on the other answers.

Are the other answers wrong b/c nothing in the stimulus supports or refutes those answers, whereas there is relatable evidence in the stimulus to reject answer D and thus make it the correct answer?

[Eric Ockert]

Hi jmramon

Yes, that's exactly right. On a Cannot Be True question, if an answer choice represents something you can't know one way or the other, that means you can't disprove it and it is incorrect. The incorrect answers here are incorrect simply because there isn't anything specific in the stimulus that outlaws or disproves them. So since they haven't been ruled out, they are possible and therefore could be true.

Hope that helps!

[nyuushi]

I'm not exactly sure how D is the correct answer, when it seems to me that the stimulus doesn't mention anything about institutions with government-selected management being "well"-run? The columnist uses the example of the military to show that similar great responsibility lies in selecting military leaders, but I don't understand how that provides reason for rejecting the idea that government-owned banks cannot be well-run. Are we supposed to infer that the military is being run well by the government, and thus banks with leadership chosen in a similar way can also be run well?

[Ryan Twomey]

Hey Nyuushi,

So this question type is a cannot be true question, which is the opposite of a must be true question. But this question is more in the category of most strongly reject, similar to most strongly supported. So it does not have to be completely false, but you can think of the question asking: 'which one of the following answers can we most strongly reject?'

Answer choice D is the answer choice that we can most strongly reject out of the five. The whole stimulus above is essentially an argument, which very very very strongly suggests that the government is capable of managing a financial institution by choosing the leaders of that financial institution.

I agree with you that the term "well managed" should give us pause, but it is still the best out of the five answer choices.

To recap, think of this cannot be true question similarly to how you think of "most strongly supported" questions in logical reasoning. They are asking for which answer choice is the most false, not which answer choice is definitively false.

I hope this helps and I wish you all of the luck in your studies.

Best,
Ryan