Logical Reasoning

PT111 · S3 · Q20 Scientist: Some critics of public

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Scientist: Some critics of public funding for this research project have maintained that only if it can be indicated how the public will benefit from the project is continued public funding for it justified.

Claims

conditional (only if, if)

According to some critics Continued funding → Can be shown how is justified public benefits

Critics were right about → not tremendous this conditional idea public support

fact The critics acknowledge that there is tremendous public support.

Evaluate

Without getting bogged down in conditional technicalities, the starting point here is understand from that last sentence that the critics are wrong about the first sentence.

The paragraph overall has this sort of structure:

Goal

The two compacted ideas in the last sentence gives us one inference, .

Another way of saying that is that .

20.

If the scientist's claims are true, which one of the following must also be true?

  1. The benefits derived from the

    Too Strong: irrelevant

    When we infer that the critics in the 1st sentence are wrong about what they say, we learn that “funding can be justified, even if we can’t indicate how the funding results in public benefit”. That means that “demonstrating how the public benefits” isn’t necessary. But this answer is saying that it isn’t relevant. That’s much stronger. It’s true to say that a 170+ LSAT score isn’t necessary to get into Harvard. It’s not true to say that a 170+ LSAT score isn’t relevant to getting into Harvard. p.s. Inference questions love to put a wicked trap answer in (A)’s slot. If we have a prediction in our heads, then (A) will try to sound like what we were looking for, but will be broken for some reason. Meanwhile, the correct answer is hiding out in (E) or (D).

    6% picked this

  2. Continued public funding for the

    Unsupported: Justified

    We don’t have any way to prove that funding is or isn’t justified. The conditional provided by "some critics" would be a way to prove that funding isn't justified, but we can't treat their view as fact. In fact that stimulus is actually telling us their view is wrong. But, again, even if we could treat the view of "Some critics" as fact, that rule still only allows one to prove when funding isn't justified. All we have the knowledge to do is say that the critics were wrong to think that justifying funding depends on indicating how it benefits the public. We have the power to say, “That’s not how we determine whether funding is justified.”

    8% picked this

  3. Public support for the research

    Too Strong: surest indication

    We don’t have any language that tells us which way of justifying funding is the #1 most sure.

    10% picked this

  4. There is tremendous public support

    Unsupported Causal Relationship: because

    We didn’t read anything causal, so we have no way to derive that public support was caused by the public seeing how they would benefit from the public.

    16% picked this

  5. Correct

    That a public benefit can

    Why this is right

    The 2nd sentence told us that the critics are wrong about what they said in the 1st sentence. This answer is just saying “the thing they said in the 1st sentence is wrong”. The first sentence said that “indicating how the public benefits” is required in order for continued funding to be justified. Since the 2nd sentence told us that the critics were wrong to say this, we can say that “indicating how the public benefits” is not required in order for continued funding to be justified.

    Skill tested: Must be True · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    60% picked this

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