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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 argument makes two linked moves: it treats a change that merely coincided with higher profit as the cause of that profit, and it then projects that repeating the same action will repeat the gain. (B) matches both moves: a one-season coincidence between a spending cut and more wins is read as causal, and the same cut is expected to bring still more wins next time.
(C) is the closest structural near-miss, but it turns on choosing between two competing named causes, tutoring versus the new curriculum, which is a different flaw from the original's single-cause-plus-projection pattern; it also has no forward-looking "cut again" step. (A) overgeneralizes to a universal law ("always increases") without ever projecting a repeat of the same action, and it quietly swaps the measured quantity from sales volume to total revenue. (D) reverses the valence, blaming an intervention for a bad outcome instead of crediting one for a good outcome. (E) shifts to a conclusion about what people value instead of a repeatable causal effect.
Only (B) reproduces both moves: coincidence read as cause, plus a forward projection of the same action.
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