LSAT 138 | Section 3 | Logical Reasoning: Q14

LR Question 14 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Mayor: Our city faces a difficult environmental…

QUESTION TYPE: Paradox

PARADOX: The city has too much garbage; it will cause environmental damage.

Recycling could reduce the amount of garbage, but increase the environmental damage.

ANALYSIS: Normally we would expect recycling to reduce pollution. There are many possibilities.

Maybe people will produce more garbage if they can recycle. Maybe recycling plants produce pollution. Maybe the recycling program costs so much money that other pollution reduction efforts must be stopped.

On paradox questions it can help to prephrase, but it’s best to just open your mind to new possibilities that would explain how recycling would make pollution worse. The right answer is often surprising.

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1. If the recycling vehicles cause less pollution, then that doesn’t help explain why the recycling program will cause damage.
2. CORRECT. This could mean that recycling would reduce pollution by 10%, for example, but that recycling would block other projects that would have reduced pollution by 40%. So recycling hurt the effort to reduce pollution by preventing more useful projects.
3. This explains why there is a garbage and pollution problem. It doesn’t explain why recycling will make the pollution problem worse.
4. This sounds like it would reduce pollution. We need an answer that shows how recycling will increase pollution.
5. This shows that recycling will encourage people to consume less. That should help reduce pollution.