November 21, 2009

Homework #31 Answer

Albert: The CEO's proposal to conduct free career seminars for high school students doesn't make much sense. Teenagers do not use our products, since they don't have enough extra spending money to buy luxury items.

Bill: I disagree. Anything we do to make the company look better can lead to us making more money in the long run. The good publicity we'll get from having these seminars will make us look very good to the general public. Good publicity, it has been proven, increases sales significantly.

Albert and Bill disagree about whether

A. the business has suffered from recent bad publicity.

(A) is incorrect. Neither Albert nor Bill expressed this idea. The key to a question like this is to read the answer choice, and ask whether one of the speakers would say yes while the other would say no; whether one speaker would agree with the statement and the other would disagree. Here, the stimulus doesn't indicate whether either Albert or Bill would agree with this statement. Bill thinks the seminars will generate good publicity, but nothing he says indicates that the company's recent publicity has been bad. Albert does not mention publicity at all.

B. the CEO's plan to offer career seminars to high school students makes financial sense for the company.

(B) is correct. Bill would agree with this statement, while Albert would disagree. Albert thinks that the company would be wasting its time providing seminars for teenagers who don't buy the company's products; Bill thinks the positive publicity will generate long-term business. Therefore Albert does not think the seminars make financial sense, and Bill does.

C. the publicity they get from the seminars will be good.

(C) is incorrect because while Bill would agree with it, we cannot say that Albert would disagree with it based on what he says in the stimulus. Albert doesn't seem to have an opinion one way or another about whether the publicity generated by the seminars will be good or bad.

D. the advice given in the seminars will enable teenagers to buy the company's products.

(D) is incorrect because while Albert might disagree with it, Bill doesn't have an opinion one way or another. Albert is concerned that teenagers don't buy the company's products, so the seminars would be a waste of time and money; this implies that he doesn't think the seminars will get the teenagers to buy the products. Bill likes the seminar idea not because he thinks teenagers will buy the products after the seminars, but that the seminars will be beneficial to the company in other ways over the long term.

E. teenagers would be more likely to buy the company's products if the company improved its public image.

(E) is incorrect because neither Albert nor Bill expresses an opinion on either the need for the company to "improve" its public image, or whether doing so would make teenagers more likely to buy the company's products. Bill might agree with this, although the benefits he foresees are more generalized, but it does not appear that Albert would disagree with it. Albert's statement does not indicate or imply any connection between the company's public image and the likelihood that teenagers will buy its products.