QUESTION TEXT: Chemical-company employee: A conservation group’s study of…
QUESTION TYPE: Necessary Assumption
CONCLUSION: Our company pollutes more than other companies our size do.
REASONING: Our company, and four other companies, release 60% of pollutants.
ANALYSIS: You, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg are together worth $100 billion dollars. You must be rich, right?
This is a whole to part flaw. This argument tells us about a group, then makes a claim about one member of the group. But individual members of a group don’t always have the same properties the group as a whole has.
It could be that the other four companies release 59.8% of pollutants, and the employee’s company only releases 0.2%.
___________
- This is just an ad hominem attack. You can never reject an argument because of who someone is, or because of what they believe.
- The employee is arguing that his company produces a lot of pollution. So his argument would be stronger if this answer isn’t true. If processing did produce chemicals, his company would produce even more pollution.
- The conclusion is only about this group of small chemical companies. Large companies are irrelevant.
- CORRECT. If the four other companies account for 59.8% of pollution, then the employee’s company would only produce a small amount of pollution.
- The conclusion is that the employee’s company produces more pollution than ‘most’ small chemical companies. So it doesn’t matter if a few of the other 25 companies produce larger amounts of pollution. The rest would produce small amounts. There’s only 40% of the pollution to go amongst those 25 companies.
Free Logical Reasoning lesson
Get a free sample of the Logical Reasoning Mastery Seminar. Learn tips for solving LR questions
Leave a Reply