Preserving Strength

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For our nation to maintain a position of economic strength relative to other countries, it requires both accelerated personal investment levels and the unobstructed growth of production capacity, the factor which is known as A by economists and which increases grows largely spontaneously through society's development of technology. However, since technology development can be driven through economic support to individual entrepreneurs, ensuring these two key economic outcomes will require balancing these two kinds of financial incentives from the government to the individual.

If the statements in the passage above are true, for our nation to maintain a position of economic strength relative to other countries, it must

Review: Preserving Strength


Explanation

Reading the prompt: it's relatively easy to get confused near the end of the prompt in this question. The last sentence mentions "two key economic outcomes" and "two kinds of financial incentives"--what do these refer to? One technique is to use the answer choices simply to understand a difficult prompt. Struggling test-takers do this all the time: they jump to the answer choices long before they're ready, because they don't know what else to do. We won't do that, but when we are having trouble understanding the prompt, we can use the answer choices...and then, we go back up and we'll still attempt to create a filter heading back down again to evaluate the answer choices.

Creating a filter: glancing at (A) and (B), we get the idea that "the two kinds of financial incentives" mentioned in the last sentence are 1) to invest and 2) to be an entrepreneur. That makes sense, because those two things are somewhat opposite and hence could be "balanced," as the prompt says. Having cleared that up makes it easier to see that the "two key economic outcomes" are accelerated personal investment levels and the growth of production capacity. Now we are able to form a filter, a brief summary of the last sentence: "the country has to encourage both investment and entrepreneurship in a balanced way."

Applying the filter: on first pass with this summary filter, (A) is in, (B) is out, (C) is out, (D) is out, and (E) is out. All of them except (A) have a miswording of the basic answer, which is to balance the two personal actions, investing and entrepreneur-ing. For example, (E) sounds good until the end, where it says both incentives drive personal investment. The correct answer is (A).


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