The cause of the wreck of the ship Edmund Fitzgerald in a severe storm on Lake Superior is still unknown. When the sunken wreckage of the vessel was found, searchers discovered the hull in two pieces lying close together. The storm's violent waves would have caused separate pieces floating even briefly on the surface to drift apart. Therefore, the breakup of the hull can be ruled out as the cause of the sinking.

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

When a city experiences a sharp decline in population, the city's tax revenues, which pay for such city services as police protection and maintenance of water lines, also decrease. The area to be policed and the number and length of the water lines to be maintained, however, do not decrease. Attempting to make up the tax revenue lost by raising tax rates is not feasible, since higher tax rates would cause even more residents to leave.

The information given most strongly supports which of the following general claims?

Pretzel vendor: The new license fee for operating a pretzel stand outside the art museum is prohibitively expensive. Charging typical prices, a vendor would need to sell an average of 25 pretzels per hour to break even. At my stand outside city hall, I average only 15 per hour. Therefore, I could not break even running a pretzel stand outside the art museum, much less turn a profit.

Which of the following, if true, most strongly supports the pretzel vendor's argument?

Correctly measuring the productivity of service workers is complex. Consider, for example, postal workers: they are often said to be more productive if more letters are delivered per postal worker. But is this really true? What if more letters are lost or delayed per worker at the same time that more are delivered?

The objection implied above to the productivity measure described is based on doubts about the truth of which of the following statements?

In a study conducted in Canada, servers in various restaurants wrote "Thank you" on randomly selected bills before presenting the bills to their customers. Tips on these bills were an average of three percentage points higher than tips on bills without the message. Therefore, if servers in Canada regularly wrote "Thank you" on restaurant their average income from tips would be significantly higher than it otherwise would have been.

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

The technological conservatism of bicycle manufacturers is a reflection of the kinds of demand they are trying to meet. The only cyclists seriously interested in innovation and willing to pay for it are bicycle racers. Therefore, innovation in bicycle technology is limited by what authorities will accept as standard for purposes of competition in bicycle races.

Which of the following is an assumption made in drawing the conclusion above?

Consumer advocate: It is generally true, at least in this state, that lawyers who advertise a specific service charge less for that service than lawyers who do not advertise. It is also true that each time restrictions on the advertising of legal services have been eliminated, the number of lawyers advertising their services has increased and legal costs to consumers have declined in consequence. However, eliminating the state requirement that legal advertisements must specify fees for specific services would almost certainly increase rather than further reduce consumers' legal costs. Lawyers would no longer have an incentive to lower their fees when they begin advertising and if no longer required to specify fee arrangements, many lawyers who now advertise would increase their fees.

In the consumer advocate's argument, the two portions in boldface play which of the following roles?

Which of the following most logically completes the passage below?

Heavy rains during Centralia's corn planting season prevented some farmers there from planting corn. It is now the planting season for soybeans, another of Centralia's principal crops, and those fields originally intended for corn are dry enough for planting. Nonetheless, even though soybean prices are unusually high at present, the farmers will leave most of these fields empty rather than plant them with soybeans, since________.

The OLEX Petroleum Company has recently determined that it could cut its refining costs by closing its refinery and consolidating all refining at its Tasberg refinery. Closing the Grenville refinery, however, would mean the immediate loss of about 1,200 jobs in the area. Eventually the lives of more than 10,000 people would be seriously disrupted. Therefore, OLEX's decision, announced yesterday, to keep open shows that at OLEX social concerns sometimes outweigh the desire for higher profits.

Which of the following, if true, most seriously undermines the argument given?

Which of the following, if true, most logically completes the argument?

Aroca County's public schools are supported primarily by taxes on property. The county plans to eliminate the property tax and support schools with a new three percent sales tax on all retail items sold in the county. Three percent of current retail sales is less than the amount collected through property taxes, but implementation of the plan would not necessarily reduce the amount of money going to Aroca County public schools, because ______.