Logical Reasoning

PT114 · S2 · Q10 It is wrong to waste our natural

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It is wrong to waste our natural resources, and it is an incredible waste of resources to burn huge amounts of trash in incinerators.

Statements

Overlapping Idea (wasting resources) It's wrong to waste natural resources. + It's a waste of natural resources to burn huge amounts of trash in incinerators.

infer: it's wrong to burn huge amounts of trash in incinerators.

Comparison When trash is recycled, fewer resources are wasted.

infer: it's less wrong to recycle trash than it is to burn huge amounts in incinerators

Conditional (if = left side, sufficient) incinerator built → less trash recycled

Reason for Judgment (because X, should not y)

Because building a new incinerator would lead to less trash being recycled, the city shouldn't do it.

Evaluate

This feels like too much of a mess to predict. There are five distinct claims. There are several Overlapping Ideas (wasting resources, building incinerators, recycling trash).

There are some opinions and some causal/conditional ideas that don't quite chain together.

Goal

Let's stay flexible and lean towards softer more provable language if it's offered. We need something we can derive from any subset of the available facts.

But the gist is that recycling trash is better than burning trash in an incinerator (because it wastes fewer resources), and since building an incinerator would lead to less recycling and more burning, we shouldn't do it.

10.

Which one of the following can be properly inferred from the statements above?

  1. All of the city’s trash

    Too Strong: all

    Although the paragraph seems to be implying that there is some relationship between the option to incinerate and the prevalence of recycling, there's no way from this paragraph that we could possibly prove that 100% of trash is either recycled or goes into an incinerator. Isn't it possible that some trash just lies at the side of the road, or gets taken by raccoons back to their den? Nothing in this paragraph excludes such possibilities, so there's no way they've forced us to think that every single piece of trash is either recycled or incinerated.

    13% picked this

  2. By recycling more trash, the

    Too Strong: entirely

    Can we imagine any city in the world that will ever "stop wasting resources entirely"? Even when we get super efficient and smart about recycling and re-purposing, it's unlikely that we won't have any speck of wasted resources. This paragraph was never saying the absurdly extreme claim that, "if we increase recycling, we can get to the point where absolutely zero of our resources are ever wasted".

    2% picked this

  3. The most effective way to

    Too Strong

    Too Strong: most effective Relative vs. Absolute We know that recycling trash is more effective at conserving resources than is burning huge amounts of trash in incinerators. But knowing that recycling is better doesn't mean we know that it's best. That's a Relative vs. Absolute switcheroo, which is always shady.

    7% picked this

  4. Correct

    If the city is to

    Why this is right

    This is an unusual correct answer in that almost all correct answers on Must Be True or Most Supported are derived by combining multiple claims together. But this answer is derived simply from the 2nd claim in the paragraph. We learn that burning huge amounts of trash in incinerators is an incredible waste of resources. Thus, if someone wants to avoid wasting resources, then they can't burn huge amounts of trash in an incinerator. If we were told that "kittens are adorable" then it must be true that "If the city wants to avoid having adorable things within its borders, then it must exclude all kittens".

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

    65% picked this

  5. If the city does not

    Too Strong

    Too Strong: won't waste Relative vs. Absolute We're told that recycling, rather than burning, trash is less wasteful. But that doesn't mean that if we avoid burning trash then we avoid any waste of resources. No one ever said that recycling was perfect and doesn't waste any resources. In fact, the wording hints at the idea that recycling still wastes some resources, but fewer than burning trash. This answer is also so logically similar to choice (B) that it should scare us away potentially from both. Both of them are making the crazy guarantee that a city can avoid wasting resources entirely, which is not even close to being a realistic goal for any city on planet Earth.

    13% picked this

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