LSAT 142 | Section 2 | Logical Reasoning: Q6

LR Question 6 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Over the last five years, every new major…

QUESTION TYPE: Strengthen

CONCLUSION: The corporations were the cause of the low environmental funding.

REASONING: Low environmental funding happened. Corporations had argued for low funding.

ANALYSIS: This argument makes a causation-correlation flaw. Just because two things happen at the same time doesn’t mean that one causes the other.

It’s possible the government didn’t fund the environmental projects for some other reason: lack of funds, laziness, over-promising. Corporations might have had nothing to do with it.

We’re trying to strengthen the argument. So either we can eliminate an alternate cause, or we can provide direct evidence that corporate influence was indeed the cause.

___________

1. We already knew that alternative energy hadn’t been receiving money for five years. This answer just extends that period to twenty. This tells us nothing about the cause of the lack of funding.
2. This weakens the argument. It shows government money is never guaranteed to
    
   be the same amount as promised, even without corporate influence.
3. CORRECT. This greatly strengthens the argument. It shows that the effect (lack of funding) was not present unless the cause was present.
    
   This still doesn’t 100% establish corporations were the cause (the two things could just be highly correlated). But this at least eliminates the possibility that funding cuts happened even when corporations said nothing.
4. This weakens the argument. It shows that there are limits to corporate influence. But we’re trying to show corporations are powerful!
5. This doesn’t tell us if the corporations were effective at discouraging research.