LR Question 11 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Activist: Accidents at the Three Mile Island…
QUESTION TYPE: Argument Evaluation
CONCLUSION: This new sewage sludge fuel technology will help us meet our energy needs with less environmental harm and without nuclear power.
REASONING: The new technology can produce oil from sewage sludge.
ANALYSIS: The stimulus lists an advantage to sewage sludge: it’s not nuclear power. But that’s all we know.
There are many other questions:
- Does sewage sludge pollute? Several answers address this.
- Is sewage sludge expensive?
- Is there enough sewage sludge to make an impact?
The wrong answer mentions that sewage sludge production has improved. I care about whether something is good now, not whether it recently got better.
___________
- If using sewage as fuel lets us avoid dumping sewage sludge, then this technology will be even more useful for protecting the environment.
- CORRECT. It doesn’t matter whether the processes have improved. That’s a relative term. We care whether the processes are currently good or bad. Those are absolute terms.If you get into a car, you care whether it is safe, not whether it is safer than it used to be. A car could be safer and still be a deathtrap.
- If sewage fuel is too expensive, then it can’t replace nuclear.
- If sewage fuel produces harmful gases, then switching to sewage from nuclear could increase pollution.
- If sewage fuel produces harmful waste, then it’s hard to see how it would be better than nuclear.
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I’m working on disproving all the wrong answer choices and I eliminated answer C because it says “economically”. No where in the stimulus does it talk about economics. Implying that the environmental concerns are the most important aspect of this argument (i.e. “better protects the environment from harm than we do at present.”)
Is this one of those “obvious real-world” pieces of knowledge (that economics plays a factor in energy needs) that LSAT expects you to come into the test with?
Yeah. I mean, if an energy plant cost 10 trillion dollars, it wouldn’t work, right? Cost is a valid consideration.
I oscillated between (A) and (B) for a bit before choosing that latter. Would it be good reasoning for this argument also to say that we don’t care about what happened BEFORE the sewage sludge became sewage sludge, we only care about the sewage sludge itself and what will CONSEQUENTLY be done with it? Eventually that’s why I chose (B). Then I considered (A) and decided that it’s relevant to know whether or not the sludge dumping does damage, because whether or not it does further justifies (or perhaps creates skepticism for) the usefulness of sludge transformation w/r to the environment.
No, we do care about the sewage sludge production process. If it’s very destructive to produce sewage sludge then it might not be a good replacement.
The error with B is really the relative/absolute error: the production method could be better, but still horrible.