CAT Critical Reasoning Practice question with Solution 38

Here’s another question in which milking the question stem really pays off. It tells us not only that we should strengthen the argument, it also tells us exactly what that argument is. OK, so what would show that changing the requirements for “top priority” cases was responsible for the better response time? We know from the stimulus that the old definition of “top priority” used to include the cases that took the longest time, so what’s missing? We don’t know whether those time-consuming cases were a significant proportion of last year’s “top priority” emergencies, but (E) fills in that gap. If the time consuming cases that are no longer part of “top priority” were fully half of last year’s “top priority emergencies,” then we would expect better response times simply from the redefinition alone.

(A) is too vague to be relevant. How long is the turnaround time for these emergencies? What relation does this decrease have to the redefinition of the top priority category? We don’t know these things, so this decrease by itself cannot strengthen the author’s conclusion.

(B) is also irrelevant. The issue of financial priorities is unrelated to the evidence and unrelated to the conclusion as well.

(C) is out of the scope. The question is whether the redefinition in fact made a difference, and not whether “experts” thought it was a good idea.

(D) is also out of the scope. The issue is this city, not other ones.