QUESTION TEXT: In polluted industrial English cities during the…
QUESTION TYPE: Strengthen
CONCLUSION: Air pollution during the industrial revolution probably got rid of black spot and tar spot.
REASONING: Black spot and tar spot disappeared at the same time that pollution increased.
ANALYSIS: This argument makes a classic LSAT error. It just tells us that pollution and the diseases disappearances are correlated.
A correlation proves nothing. To support the conclusion we need to find something that suggests that pollution actually caused the diseases to go away.
Note that the conclusion just says “likely”. So the argument doesn’t need ironclad evidence to be a good one.
___________
- This says that plants can develop resistance to pollution. But the argument is about the disappearance of plant diseases.
- This is just a random fact about the diseases. This answer doesn’t tell us whether pollution can affect black spot and tar spot.
- This is a useless fact. We want to show that pollution does affect plant diseases. This answer just introduces uncertainty.
- CORRECT. This shows that the effect returned after the cause vanished. This strengthens the idea that pollution actually affects the plant diseases.
- I’d say this weakens the argument. If pollution weakens two plant diseases then it’s reasonable to expect that pollution would weaken other plant diseases.
Since this answer says that no other plant diseases were affected, this increases the odds that the decline of tar spot and black spot was due to some other factor.
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