Airline Representative: The percentage of flight delays caused by airline error decreased significantly this year. This indicates that airlines listen...
GMAT Critical Reasoning : (CR) Questions
Airline Representative: The percentage of flight delays caused by airline error decreased significantly this year. This indicates that airlines listened to complaints about preventable errors and addressed the problems. Although delays caused by weather and other uncontrollable factors will always be part of travel, preventable delays are clearly decreasing.
Which of the following most clearly points to a logical flaw in the representative's reasoning?
Passage Analysis:
| Text from Passage | Analysis |
| The percentage of flight delays caused by airline error decreased significantly this year. |
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| This indicates that airlines listened to complaints about preventable errors and addressed the problems. |
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| Although delays caused by weather and other uncontrollable factors will always be part of travel, preventable delays are clearly decreasing. |
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Argument Flow:
The argument starts with a statistical fact about fewer airline-caused delays, then jumps to explain this as proof that airlines listened to complaints and fixed problems, finally reinforcing that preventable delays are trending downward.
Main Conclusion:
Airlines have successfully addressed customer complaints about preventable delays, as shown by the significant decrease in airline-caused flight delays this year.
Logical Structure:
The representative uses one piece of evidence (decreased percentage of airline-caused delays) to support a specific causal explanation (airlines listened and responded to complaints). The argument assumes this decrease directly proves the proposed cause-and-effect relationship.
Prethinking:
Question type:
Misc - This is a logical flaw question asking us to identify what's wrong with the representative's reasoning
Precision of Claims
The argument deals with percentages of flight delays caused by airline error decreasing, and makes a causal claim about why this happened
Strategy
For logical flaw questions, we need to identify gaps in reasoning, alternative explanations, or faulty assumptions. The representative concludes that airlines listened to complaints and fixed problems based solely on the percentage decrease. We should look for scenarios that show this conclusion might be wrong or that there could be other explanations for the data
This suggests airlines might underreport their errors for financial reasons. While this could be a concern, it doesn't directly point to a flaw in the representative's reasoning about the data they already have. The representative is making a logical error in interpreting the percentage decrease, not necessarily using false data.
This says uncontrollable delays could have increased complaints to airlines. However, this doesn't identify the core logical flaw in how the representative interprets the percentage decrease. Whether complaints increased or not doesn't affect the reasoning error about what the percentage change means.
This questions whether complaints are a reliable measure of errors. But the representative isn't basing their conclusion on complaint data - they're basing it on the percentage of delays caused by airline error. This misses the actual logical flaw in the argument.
This is correct because it identifies the key logical flaw. If weather delays increased dramatically, then even if airline-caused delays stayed exactly the same (or even increased), they would represent a smaller percentage of total delays. The representative incorrectly assumes that a percentage decrease means an actual improvement, when it could just be a mathematical artifact of other delays increasing. This perfectly exposes the flaw in reasoning.
This suggests customers might not believe airline explanations about delay causes. However, this doesn't point to the logical flaw in the representative's interpretation of the statistical data. The issue isn't about customer perceptions but about how percentages can be misleading.