Country X’s recent stock-trading scandal should not diminish investors’ confidence in the country’s stock market. For one thing, the discovery of the scandal confirms that Country X has a strong regulatory system, as the following considerations show. In any stock market, some fraudulent activity is inevitable. If a stock market is well regulated, any significant stock-trading fraud in it will very likely be discovered. This deters potential perpetrators and facilitates improvement in regulatory processes.

In the argument, the portion in boldface plays which of the following roles?

The kinds of hand and wrist injuries that result from extended use of a computer while maintaining an incorrect posture are common among schoolchildren in Harnville. Computers are important to the school curriculum there, so instead of reducing the amount their students use computers, teachers plan to bring about a sharp reduction in the number of these injuries by carefully monitoring their students’ posture when using computers in the classroom.

Which of the following would it be most useful to know in order to assess the likelihood that the teachers’ plan will be successful?

Last year Comfort Airlines had twice as many delayed flights as the year before, but the number of complaints from passengers about delayed flights went up three times. It is unlikely that this disproportionate increase in complaints was rooted in an increase in overall dissatisfaction with the service Comfort Airlines provides, since the airline made a special effort to improve other aspects of its service last year.

Which of the following, if true, most helps to explain the disproportionate increase in customer complaints?

In Wareland last year, 16 percent of licensed drivers under 21 and 11 percent of drivers ages 21-24 were in serious accidents. By contrast, only 3 percent of licensed drivers 65 and older were involved in serious accidents. These figures clearly show that the greater experience and developed habits of caution possessed by drivers in the 65-and-older group make them far safer behind the wheel than younger drivers are.

Which of the following is an assumption on which the argument depends?

Proponents of the recently introduced tax on sales of new luxury boats had argued that a tax this sort would be an equitable way to increase government revenue because the admittedly heavy tax burden would fall only on wealthy people and neither they nor anyone else would suffer any economic hardship. In fact, however, 20 percent of the workers employed by manufacturers of luxury boats have lost their jobs as a direct result of this tax.

The information given, if true, most strongly supports which of the following?

Newspaper editor should not allow reporters to write the headlines for their own stories. The reason for this is that, while the headlines that reporters themselves write are often clever, what typically makes them clever is that they allude to little-known information that is familiar to the reporter but that never appears explicitly in the story itself.

Which of the following, if true, most strengthens the argument ?

Manufacturing plants in Arundia have recently been acquired in substantial number by investors from abroad. Arundian politicians are proposing legislative action to stop such investment, justifying the proposal by arguing that foreign investors, opportunistically exploiting a recent fall in the value of the Arundian currency, were able to buy Arundian assets at less than their true value.

Which of the following, if true, casts the most serious doubt on the adequacy of the Arundian politicians’ justification for the proposed legislation?

Which of the following most logically completes the passage?

According to the last pre-election poll in Whippleton, most voters believe that the three problems government needs to address, in order of importance, are pollution, crime, and unemployment. Yet in the election, candidates from parties perceived as strongly against pollution were defeated, while those elected were all from parties with a history of opposing legislation designed to reduce pollution. These results should not be taken to indicate that the poll was inaccurate, however, since __________.

Economist: The price of tap water in our region should be raised drastically. Supplies in local freshwater reservoirs have been declining for years because water is being used faster than it can be replenished. Since the price of tap water has been low, few users have bothered to adopt even easy conservation measures.

The two sections in boldface play which of the following roles in the economist’s argument?

The heavy traffic in Masana is a growing drain on the city's economy—the clogging of the streets of the central business district alone cost the economy more than $1.2 billion over the past year. In order to address this problem, officials plan to introduce congestion pricing, by which drivers would pay to enter the city's most heavily trafficked areas during the busiest times of the day.

Which of the following, if true, would most strongly indicate that the plan will be a success?