Manager: Although our corporation lists rules in an orientation booklet, few employees read the booklet carefully enough to familiarize themselves with all the rules. Lecturing employees for inadvertent rule violations often makes them resentful and less cooperative. Thus, to improve employee adherence to rules, we plan to issue gentle reminders about various rules in each issue of our weekly newsletter.

Which of the following would it be most helpful to discover about the employees in the corporation in order to evaluate the likelihood that the plan will succeed?

Public health official: Some researchers suspect that magnetic fields from high-voltage power lines can cause health problems for people who live especially near the lines. However, this is extremely unlikely: Beyond a distance of a few feet, the strength of the magnetic fields from high-voltage power lines is less than the average strength of magnetic fields in homes that are not located near such lines.

Which of the following would it be most useful to establish in order to evaluate the public health argument?

Paper and plastic grocery bags are a continuing problem for the city, both as litter and in landfills. To discourage their use, the city has proposed a tax on each bag, to be paid by the supermarkets that supply them. Several environmental groups, however, oppose the tax, despite having brought the issue to the council's attention in the first place.

Which of the following, if true, would best explain the environmental groups' opposition to the proposed tax?

Airport official: Local residents have been complaining that night flights into Plainsville airport disturb their sleep and should be sharply reduced in number. This complaint is completely unreasonable—there have been night flights coming into the airport from the very beginning, twenty years ago, and these residents should have taken that fact into account when buying their homes.

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

A physically active lifestyle has been shown to help increase longevity. In the Wistar region of Bellaria, the average age at death is considerably higher than in any other part of the country. Wistar is the only mountainous part of Bellaria. A mountainous terrain makes even such basic activities as walking relatively strenuous; it essentially imposes a physically active lifestyle on people. Clearly, this circumstance explains the long lives of people in Wistar.

Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the argument?

Fashion company executive: The number of competing brands of clothing is increasing much more quickly than is consumer demand for new clothing. As a result, it is becoming ever more for our clothing company to keep consumers focused on our products. To increase our sales, therefore, our company plans to introduce innovative, eye-catching lines of clothing much more frequently.

To evaluate whether the plan described by the executive would be likely to achieve its goal, it would be most useful to know which of the following?

The recent rise of low-cost airlines in Country Y has led to great increases in the number of air travelers and flights. However, a "hidden cost" of flying and certain other forms of travel is the significant amount of air pollution, which contributes to global warming. To make people pay these hidden costs—and in the process discourage the explosive growth in flying—the government of Country Y plans to impose fees on all air travel. There is a problem, however, in that many residents of Country Y would then use automobile transportation instead, without paying the hidden costs of the resulting air pollution.

Which of the following additions to the government's plan would be likely to help most in overcoming the problem referred to in the final sentence above?

The Acme Corporation has found that improvements in its information technology infrastructure allow its employees to make more decisions that are both sound and well-informed than was previously feasible. Consequently, the corporation plans to improve employee productivity by introducing new managerial techniques that delegate much of the decision-making to lower levels of the organizational hierarchy. Managers will simply set clear standards and guidelines and then allow employee teams to undertake tasks without centralized control.

Which of the following, if true, would most strongly support a prediction that the Acme Corporation's plan will achieve its goal?

The faster a car is traveling, the less time the driver has to avoid a potential accident, and if a car does crash, higher speeds increase the risk of a fatality. Between 1995 and 2000, average highway speeds increased significantly in the United States, yet, over that time, there was a drop in the number of car-crash fatalities per highway mile driven by cars.

Which of the following, if true about the United States between 1995 and 2000, most helps to explain why the fatality rate decreased in spite of the increase in average highway speeds?

An influential stock analyst recommends the purchase of three infrequently traded stocks in each of his weekly magazine columns. Unusually large amounts of these stocks are often purchased one day before the magazine appears on the newsstands. This pattern has recurred over a period.

Suppose that the information presented above is accurate. Each of the following statements, if true, could help to explain why the unusually large purchases occurred EXCEPT: