Prep2012-Pack1-CR-023 VCR00710 Medium
Products sold under a brand name used to command premium prices because, in general, they were superior to nonbrand rival products. Technical expertise in product development has become so widespread, however, that special quality advantages are very hard to obtain these days and even harder to maintain. As a consequence, brand-name products generally neither offer higher quality nor sell at higher prices. Paradoxically, brand names are a bigger marketing advantage than ever.
Which of the following, if true, most helps to resolve the paradox above?
A. Brand names are taken by consumers as a guarantee of getting a product as good as the best rival products.
B. Consumers recognize that the quality of products sold under invariant brand names can drift over time.
C. In many acquisitions of one corporation by another, the acquiring corporation is interested more in acquiring the right to use certain brand names than in acquiring existing production facilities.
D. In the days when special quality advantages were easier to obtain than they are now, it was also easier to get new brand names established.
E. The advertising of a company's brand-name products is at times transferred to a new advertising agency, especially when sales are declining.
Prep2012-Pack1-CR-024 VCR00762 Medium
A museum has been offered an undocumented statue, supposedly Greek and from the sixth century B.C. Possibly the statue is genuine but undocumented because it was recently unearthed or because it has been privately owned.
However, an ancient surface usually has uneven weathering, whereas the surface of this statue has the uniform quality characteristically produced by a chemical bath used by forgers to imitate a weathered surface. Therefore, the statue is probably a forgery.
Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the argument?
A. Museums can accept a recently unearthed statue only with valid export documentation from its country of origin.
B. The subject's pose and other aspects of the subject's treatment exhibit all the most common features of Greek statues of the sixth century B.C.
C. The chemical bath that forgers use was at one time used by dealers and collectors to remove the splotchy
surface appearance of genuinely ancient sculptures.
D. Museum officials believe that forgers have no technique that can convincingly simulate the patchy weathering characteristic of the surfaces of ancient sculptures.
E. An allegedly Roman sculpture with a uniform surface similar to that of the statue being offered to the museum was recently shown to be a forgery.
Prep2012-Pack1-CR-025 VCR06878 Medium
Manufacturers of mechanical pencils make most of their profit on pencil leads rather than on the pencils themselves.
The Write Company, which cannot sell its leads as cheaply as other manufacturers can, plans to alter the design of its mechanical pencil so that it will accept only a newly designed Write Company lead, which will be sold at the same price as the Write Company's current lead.
Which of the following, if true, most strongly supports the Write Company's projection that its plan will lead to an increase in its sales of pencil leads?
A. First-time buyers of mechanical pencils tend to buy the least expensive mechanical pencils available.
B. Annual sales of mechanical are expected to triple over the next five years.
C. Write Company executive is studying ways to reduce the cost of manufacturing pencil leads.
D. A rival manufacturer recently announced similar plans to introduce a mechanical pencil that would accept only the leads produced by that manufacturer.
E. In extensive test marketing, mechanical-pencil users found the new Write Company pencil markedly superior to other mechaical pencils they had used.
