P: Complying with the new safety regulations is useless. Even if the new regulations had been in effect before last year’s laboratory fire, they would not have prevented the fire or the do not address its underlying causes.
Q: But any regulations that can potentially prevent money from being wasted are useful. If obeyed, the new safety regulations will prevent some accidents, and whenever there is an accident here even if no one is injured.
What this question is testing
P's position
P says: don't bother following the new safety rules. They wouldn't have stopped last year's fire because they don't hit the actual causes.
Q's position
Q pushes back: rules that prevent wasted money are useful, and these rules would prevent some accidents (which always waste money). So they're useful.
Evaluate
The clean clash is right on the surface: P literally says "useless," Q literally says "useful." They're taking opposite positions on the same question.
For Point-at-Issue questions, the right answer is something both speakers actually address and clearly disagree about. Watch out for answers about details only one of them mentioned (like the cost of last year's fire, or whether people will obey the rules) — those don't pass the both-addressed test.
Goal
Find: are the new regulations useful (or useless) to comply with?
Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.