PrepTest 141, Section 4, 12. Worldwide, more books were sold…

How will the right answer fit in terms of support and conclusion?

Only the right answer will be a conclusion supported by the passage.

Highlight the main conclusion in the passage, if there is one:

There’s no conclusion the passage. The right answer will be the conclusion.

[BACKGROUND]. In particular, [SUPPORT]. [SUPPORT]. Indeed, [BACKGROUND]. However, [BACKGROUND].

You won’t necessarily know which parts are background and which are support until you start checking the answers, so don’t worry too much if you didn’t have all these tags. The key thing is to find an answer that’s directly supported by at least one of these statements.

Map the wording of the answers to the wording of the passage:

(A) Last year there more cookbooks sold that were not intended for beginners…

All of this maps to wording in the passage, so in any case you should not be eliminating this one. More specifically, if last year was the bestselling year for cookbooks ever, and it had the highest share of non-beginner cookbooks ever, then it had to be the bestselling year for non-beginner cookbooks ever. This ain’t a math test though. So if that conclusion isn’t clear to you, expect to be able to eliminate the rest of the answers because of issues with the wording.

(B) The best-selling cookbook last year…

…is never mentioned. We can’t make a conclusion about any individual book except Problem-Free Cooking, and all we know about that one is it’s for beginners and apparently you can get it even in Antarctica.

(C) Sales of cookbooks intended for beginners were lower last year…

I don’t think so. All the info in the passage is about “more” books being sold. There’s no way that info leads to a conclusion about sales being “lower”. Please don’t ever forget that you are not being asked to add in your own reasoning.

(D) …were purchased by professional cooks.

The passage does say that “more cookbooks than ever were purchased by professional cooks”, but it doesn’t actually say they bought the non-beginner ones. And even if it did, the “most” in this answer doesn’t map to “more than ever”, which could definitely still be 50% or less of the total.

(E) Problem-Free Cooking sold more copies last year…

There’s no info about the sales of this particular book, so there’s no support for making this comparison between its sales and sales of other cookbooks.

(A) is the correct answer.