73 LR One Question 15
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Could you please tell me why (A) is not a right answer?
Yeah, (A) is tempting; if things might have been even worse otherwise, then the ad campaign wasn't a total failure, right?
But that's the thing! Here, the consultant is only arguing that it would be ineffective and unpopular. If sales are down from last year, and new products are particularly weak, it's very difficult to try to argue that the ad was effective and popular, even if it wasn't an absolute failure.
Ohhh, okay. So, we are supposed to read the consultant's definition of "ill conceived" as "ineffective + unpopular?" Meaning that the conclusion becomes, more specifically, "the competitor's campaign was ineffective and unpopular?" (I honestly had disregarded the first sentence because I didn't see the relevance of that information. Yikes.)
Using that definition of "ill conceived" makes choosing B over A much easier. The flip of that is "the competitor's campaign was popular with customers and effective in promoting products, despite the lower sales that resulted," which can only be strengthened by B.
Is that what you mean in the comment above? Wanna make sure I understand the difference between A and B.
IN all cases, all the time, you should accept the traditional meaning of the words the test writers use. Here, there are many ways an ad campaign might be ill conceived, and certainly, being unpopular and ineffective are two of them.
I'd say the most important flaw in (A) as a choice is that an ad campaign that sees sales drop and new products selling especially poorly cannot be considered a success, even if those products might not have done any better in its absence.
I chose A but looking back I thought A was wrong because it says "in the absence of the campaign" which is irrelevant to the reasoning that we are trying to critique. Don't we need something that caused the sales figures to drop alongside the ad campaign (rather than in the absence of it)? If the ad campaign does not exist or did not happen, then our argument would not have happened. While I did find A tempting and ultimately chose it when taking the pratctice test, this was my own personal reasoning for why I got it wrong. Is this a valid way to get rid of these answers?
The structure of (A) is fine; if you want to show that something produces an effect, it's very useful to know that the effect doesn't occur in the thing's absence. Here, it's the content that's bad (see my note above for more on that).