Tourists have long complained that hotel accommodations in Midville are too expensive. Starting last year, the city council, hoping to...
GMAT Critical Reasoning : (CR) Questions
Tourists have long complained that hotel accommodations in Midville are too expensive. Starting last year, the city council, hoping to attract more tourists, lowered the hotel tax rate to 5 percent of room charges. By the end of last year, Midville had taken in no less money from hotel taxes than it did the year before, so an examination of the hotel records will show that more tourists stayed in city hotels last year than the year before.
Which of the following is an assumption on which the argument depends?
Passage Analysis:
| Text from Passage | Analysis |
| Tourists have long complained that hotel accommodations in Midville are too expensive. |
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| Starting last year, the city council, hoping to attract more tourists, lowered the hotel tax rate to 5 percent of room charges. |
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| By the end of last year, Midville had taken in no less money from hotel taxes than it did the year before |
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| so an examination of the hotel records will show that more tourists stayed in city hotels last year than the year before. |
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Argument Flow:
The argument starts with a problem (expensive hotels), describes a solution (lower tax rate), presents evidence (same tax revenue despite lower rate), and concludes this proves more tourists came.
Main Conclusion:
More tourists stayed in Midville hotels last year than the year before.
Logical Structure:
The author reasons that since the city collected the same hotel tax money despite lowering the tax rate, the only way this could happen is if more tourists stayed in hotels. This assumes that lower taxes led to lower hotel prices and that nothing else changed to affect the relationship between tax revenue and tourist numbers.
Prethinking:
Question type:
Assumption - We need to find what must be true for the argument's conclusion to work. The author concludes that more tourists stayed in hotels based on the fact that tax revenue didn't decrease despite a lower tax rate.
Precision of Claims
The argument makes specific quantity claims: tax revenue stayed the same or increased, tax rate was lowered to 5%, and concludes more tourists stayed. We need to focus on what connects lower tax rates to same revenue to more tourists.
Strategy
Look for gaps in the logic that could make the conclusion false while keeping the facts intact. The author assumes that if tax revenue stayed the same with a lower rate, more tourists must have stayed. But what if something else explains the same revenue? We need to identify what must be true to rule out alternative explanations.
This choice suggests tourists needed to be aware of the tax reduction for the argument to work. However, the author's conclusion is based purely on tax revenue data and hotel records, not on tourist awareness or behavior changes. Whether tourists knew about the tax cut doesn't affect the mathematical relationship between tax rates, revenue, and number of stays that forms the core of the argument.
This compares Midville's hotel prices to other cities, but the argument doesn't rely on any comparison to other destinations. The author's logic is entirely internal to Midville - comparing this year's tax revenue and tourist numbers to last year's within the same city. Relative pricing compared to competitors isn't necessary for the revenue-to-tourist-number conclusion.
This is essential for the argument. If hotel room prices (before taxes) had increased significantly last year, then the city could maintain the same tax revenue despite lower tax rates without needing more tourists - the higher base prices would compensate for the lower tax percentage. The author assumes that room prices stayed relatively stable so that maintained tax revenue with lower rates must mean more tourists stayed.
Additional publicity efforts would actually weaken the argument by providing an alternative explanation for any increase in tourists. If there were significantly more promotional efforts, increased tourism could be attributed to better marketing rather than lower taxes. The argument doesn't require increased publicity - it needs to isolate the tax reduction as the cause.
Tourist spending on meals versus accommodations is irrelevant to the argument, which focuses solely on hotel tax revenue and the number of tourists staying in hotels. The conclusion doesn't depend on any relationship between different categories of tourist spending.