#16 - Economist: If the economy grows stronger, employment

[Adam Tyson]

Kelly, your reasoning for answer C is good!

Abutz, regarding the Negation Technique, it looks like you may be confusing it with making a Mistaken Negation when analyzing a conditional argument. These are two different things. For an Assumption question, we are looking for something that the author MUST believe is true, so if it is negated (made false) that should hurt the argument. Taking away something that is necessary always hurts! So this technique is a way of testing an Assumption answer. A Mistaken Negation is a logical error, where you incorrectly use a conditional statement to prove that in the absence of the sufficient condition, the necessary condition cannot occur. Check your Lesson 5 materials to learn more about the Assumption Negation Technique as it applies to this question type.

And your analysis of answer D looks correct - good work!

One more note, and that is that another way to negate answer C is to say that in a growing economy the number of daycare workers is NOT likely to decrease, which means that the number could remain stable. That doesn't hurt the argument because in that growing economy, with more parents needing to find daycare, a stable number of daycare workers would still lead to a harder time finding daycare. We would need the number of daycare workers to increase proportionally to keep pace with the growing needs of those working parents. Our author doesn't have to believe in a decreasing number of workers, but only in the number of workers not sufficiently keeping pace with the growing need.