LSAT 118 | Section 4 | Logical Reasoning: Q7

LR Question 7 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: A typical gasoline-powered lawn mower emits …

QUESTION TYPE: Strengthen

CONCLUSION: People can help reduce air pollution by choosing electric lawn mowers over gas ones.

REASONING: Gas lawn mowers produce lots of air pollution. Electric mowers emit no air pollutants.

ANALYSIS: If you use a gas lawn mower for one hour, you’re emitting as many pollutants as a vehicle.

If you use an electric mower for an hour, you’re emitting no pollutants.

Think about how you can produce emissions. It’s not only when you’re using an object. Like an electric car. You might not be polluting while you’re driving, but you’re still using a lot of electricity while you’re charging it. Electricity causes pollution.

Same thing goes here. The argument only discusses emissions from using the mower. But electric mowers still need electricity, and producing that electricity might cause pollution elsewhere.

Yet, according to the argument, electric mowers are more eco-friendly overall. To strengthen that, we need to know that: even after accounting for the power needed to run electric mowers, electric mowers still cause less air pollution than gas mowers.

___________

1. Sure, but that’s true of all lawns. This doesn’t support why it’s better to choose electric mowers.
2. This means there’s a disincentive to switch. But that doesn’t tell us anything about whether the eco-friendly decision is to switch.
3. CORRECT. Gas mowers emit about as much pollution per hour as automobiles. So if the electricity for an electric mower causes less pollution than running a car for an hour, it also causes less pollution than running a gas mower for an hour.
    
   That supports the claim that switching to electric mowers would reduce air pollution overall.
4. Future improvements to gas mowers don’t show that electric mowers currently reduce pollution more.
5. Well, duh. But we’re not comparing total emissions from lawn mowers to total emissions from automobiles. We’re comparing different lawn mowers to each other.