IMAT 2017 Q10 [Argument | Comparison Websites]

It is common practice to look online for a loan or a mortgage. This has led to a large number of ‘comparison websites’ where you type in your details and they search a range of companies for you based on these details. Night after night, there are adverts on television emphasising how much time and money comparison sites could save you. The experience of one user should make you consider the wisdom of using such sites. She gave her details to a comparison website and received no useful results. However, for weeks afterwards she was bombarded with emails and phone calls from companies she had never heard of.

Which one of the following is the best statement of the flaw in the above argument?

A. It assumes using the internet is the only way to get a loan.
B. It attacks the website and not what the company does.
C. It assumes that comparison websites save customers money.
D. It assumes everyone uses comparison websites.
E. It draws a conclusion based on one example of how a company operates.

Reminder:

  • Read the question first
  • Read the passage
  • Find the conclusion, highlight keywords
  • Find assumptions that the argument lies on
  • Attack these assumptions with the answer options
  • Discard any invalid options and you’ll have your answer

This is a classic example of projection, just because it happened to one person does not mean it will happen to everyone.

Projecting
This is where the author will project the qualities of usually a smaller group onto another usually larger group. This might be in the form of providing information about a subset of a population and extrapolating to the entirety of it.

An example: There are many stories of Rottweiler dogs attacking humans, therefore all Rottweilers should be banned.

This is taking the result of a small group and projecting it onto the whole population of that group. It fails to take into consideration any other factor, such as maybe these dogs are more frequently bought by people who tend to be involved in violence or attacks.

A. It assumes using the internet is the only way to get a loan.

This is not the case, the opening line says that ‘it is common practice to look online for a loan…’ but it does not mean it is the only way. The language used leaves the door open for there being other possible ways as well. Therefore A is incorrect.

B. It attacks the website and not what the company does.

The company and the website are basically the same things in this case, and this is just a distractor answer. The company provides the website, but the website is carrying out the purpose of that company. So what the company does is done by the website, making this answer illogical. Therefore B is incorrect.

C. It assumes that comparison websites save customers money.

The author does not make this assumption at any point and remains sceptical about these websites. Notice the sentence ‘Night after night, there are adverts on television emphasising how much time and money comparison sites could save you’. The author then refutes this based on the one customer who said she did not receive such savings from using their services. Therefore C is not a flaw in the argument.

D. It assumes everyone uses comparison websites.

The only indication of the usage of these sites is the first sentence that states it is ‘common practice’ to use these sites, and also the mention of how there is a large number of these sites which we can assume means there is a lot of demand. To say ‘everyone’ uses them is immediately a red flag, and we can quickly prove that the author’s language above shows that, while many may use them, we cannot assume that everyone does. Therefore D is incorrect.

E. It draws a conclusion based on one example of how a company operates.

This is what projecting is, we are taking one specific case and then generalizing it to say that it will happen everytime. There is emphasis on how there are many websites and how it is common practice to do this, so we cannot assume that the experience of one woman will be the same for everyone. Therefore E is the correct answer.