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Consultant: A firm's profit equals its revenue minus its costs. Last year our client cut its advertising budget sharply, and its profit rose. Cutting advertising therefore raised the client's profit, and cutting it further next year will raise profit again.
Which of the following arguments is most similar in its reasoning to the argument above?
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Correct answer
B
The original commits two linked moves: it treats a change that merely coincided with higher profit as its cause, then projects that doing more of the same will repeat the gain. (B) matches both: a one-season coincidence between a spending cut and more wins is read as causal, and the same action is expected to bring still more wins.
(C) is the structural near-miss, but it turns on choosing between two competing named causes, a different flaw from the original's single-cause-plus-projection. (A) overgeneralizes to a universal law without the future-repeat-of-the-same-action step. (D) reverses the valence, and (E) shifts to a preference conclusion.
only (B) reproduces coincidence-as-cause plus forward projection.
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