LR Question 11 Explanation
QUESTION TEXT: Activist: Accidents at the Three Mile Island and…
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.
More Resources for Argument Evaluation Questions
- Intro Course lesson: This intro course lesson covers Argument Evaluation questions.
- Mastery Seminar lesson: This LR Mastery seminar lesson covers argument evaluation questions.
I have to agree with Tia on this. On just about every LSAT question you apparently aren’t supposed to bring in outside conditions. Here, the stimulus has NO detail that even tips the hat towards an economic concern as being part of the argument. I was stuck between B and C and went with C for this reason. Sometimes it just seems a bit of a crapshoot, but then again I guess a 160 is a decent score anyway :/
So nowhere does the LSAT say “ignore common sense” or “don’t bring in outside information”. That’s something people repeat online, and various people must teach it. But it’s just a shortcut and it’s not a rule.
The reason some people teach this is that a lot of people get distracted by outside info or use it badly. My own view is this: if EVERYONE would agree a factor is relevant, then you can assume it is relevant.
There’s no world in which cost is irrelevant for electricity generation.
Note: This is an old comment but I wanted to clarify the point.
I am not able to make sense of this answer – I almost wonder if I’m reading the question wrong?
I choose C.
Here’s why:
The question is asking what the activist is LEAST concerned with regarding the new method. The activist is concerned with the environment and the entire stimulus only discusses the environment. Given that, I figured the activist would be least concerned with the costs.
Knowing that c is incorrect, I did pick b as my second choice – but I still can’t fully understand why c is wrong.
From real world knowledge, we know cost is relevant. We don’t live in a magical world. If a new power plant costs $10 trillion dollars and alternatives cost $10 million, we simply can’t build the first one. If something is not economically sustainable, then by definition it isn’t something we can do.
You’re allowed to use reasonable outside knowledge and the dictionary definitions of words when assessing an answer’s relevance. Unsustainable means “we can’t do it”. No outside info needed.
Note: This is an old comment but I wanted to clarify the point.
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.