Ramirez: The film industry claims that pirated DVDs, which are usually cheaper than legitimate DVDs and become available well before...
GMAT Critical Reasoning : (CR) Questions
Ramirez: The film industry claims that pirated DVDs, which are usually cheaper than legitimate DVDs and become available well before a film's official DVD release date, adversely affect its bottom line. But the industry should note what the spread of piracy indicates: consumers want lower prices and faster DVD releases. Lowering prices of DVDs and releasing them sooner would mitigate piracy's negative effect on film industry profits.
The argument above relies on which of the following assumptions?
Passage Analysis:
| Text from Passage | Analysis |
| The film industry claims that pirated DVDs, which are usually cheaper than legitimate DVDs and become available well before a film's official DVD release date, adversely affect its bottom line. |
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| But the industry should note what the spread of piracy indicates: consumers want lower prices and faster DVD releases. |
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| Lowering prices of DVDs and releasing them sooner would mitigate piracy's negative effect on film industry profits. |
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Argument Flow:
Ramirez starts with the industry's complaint about piracy, then reframes piracy as valuable consumer feedback, leading to a proposed solution based on meeting consumer demands.
Main Conclusion:
The film industry can reduce piracy's negative impact on profits by lowering DVD prices and releasing them sooner.
Logical Structure:
The argument assumes that if the industry addresses the underlying consumer demands revealed by piracy (lower prices and faster availability), consumers will choose legitimate DVDs over pirated ones, thereby reducing the financial harm from piracy.
Prethinking:
Question type:
Assumption - We need to find what must be true for Ramirez's conclusion to work. The conclusion is that lowering prices and releasing DVDs sooner would reduce piracy's negative impact on profits.
Precision of Claims
The key claims involve specific activities (lowering prices, faster releases) and their predicted effects (mitigating profit losses from piracy). We need to focus on what connects consumer behavior with industry actions.
Strategy
To find assumptions, we need to think about what could make Ramirez's solution fail while keeping all the stated facts true. If we can identify what must be true for the argument to work, we've found our assumptions. We'll look for gaps between what piracy indicates (consumer wants) and whether giving consumers what they want will actually solve the profit problem.
This focuses on whether earlier legitimate DVD releases would hurt theatrical revenue, but Ramirez's argument doesn't address the relationship between DVD timing and theater profits at all. We're only concerned with how the proposed changes would affect piracy's impact on overall film industry profits. This assumption isn't necessary for the argument to work.
This is exactly what the argument must assume. If Ramirez claims that lowering prices and releasing DVDs sooner will reduce piracy's negative impact on profits, then some people who currently buy pirated DVDs must be willing to switch to legitimate DVDs under these improved conditions. Without this behavioral change, the proposed solution would be completely ineffective.
The argument never discusses production costs or the industry's ability to make DVDs more cheaply. Ramirez simply states that prices should be lowered and releases should be faster - whether this requires cheaper production methods or just accepting lower profit margins per DVD is irrelevant to the logic.
While this might be a nice side effect of Ramirez's proposal, it's not necessary for the argument. Even if pirate DVD sellers stayed in business, as long as enough consumers switched to legitimate DVDs (as in choice B), the negative impact on profits would still be mitigated.
Whether pirate DVD buyers know about authorization is completely irrelevant to Ramirez's argument. The argument is about consumer behavior in response to price and timing, not about consumer awareness of legal issues.