LSAT 156 | Section 2 | Logical Reasoning: Q18

LR Question 18 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Dapolito: The city council recently passed a rent-control ordinance …

QUESTION TYPE: Sufficient Assumption

CONCLUSION: The city council’s goal isn’t to protect the quality and availability of local rentals.

REASONING: The study says rent control makes rentals worse, and the city council passed rent control anyway.

ANALYSIS: Just because rent control has bad effects does not automatically tell us what the city council wanted. Maybe they didn’t know about those effects. Maybe they disagreed with the study. Maybe they thought other benefits mattered more.

So for the conclusion to follow, we need to know that the council members who voted for rent control accepted the study’s conclusions. Once you add that, the reasoning works: they knew rent control would hurt quality and availability, but they passed it anyway, so preserving those things could not have been their objective.

___________

1. Even if the study was impartial, the council still might not know about it or agree with it.
2. Irrelevant. The argument is about the council’s objective, not whether rent control is an appropriate subject for the council.
3. CORRECT. If the council members who voted for rent control agree with the study’s conclusions, then their vote strongly suggests preserving quality and availability was not their aim.
4. Tempting but weak. Profit motives don’t establish the council’s overall objective.
5. This actually hurts the argument. If the council sometimes acts irrationally, then its actions are a less reliable guide to its objectives.