Naturalist: To be dependable, the accounting framework used by national economists to advise the government must take into account all of our nation’s assets; but the current accounting framework used by our national economists assigns no value to government-owned natural resources, which are clearly assets.
Statements
Conditional (to be X, must Y)
Dependable take into account all accounting → of our nation's assets framework
Fact
The current framework assigns no value to government-owned natural resources, which are clearly assets.
Evaluate
Whenever we see a conditional rule presented on an Inference question, we know to look for two things: 1. does this rule get chained up with any other conditional rules?
2. is there a fact we can apply this rule to (usually via contrapositive)
Also, when we see that the final idea in the paragraph is set up with a Pivot (but, yet, however), it usually means that the correct answer tries to integrate that final idea with what came before it.
There's only one conditional here, so we don't have to worry about chains. If we did the contrapositive of that rule, we would get:
framework doesn't take not dependable into account all of a → accounting nation's assets framework
Does the "current accounting framework" take into account all of this nation's assets?
No, it assigns no value to government-owned natural resources, which is one of this nation's assets.
Goal
By applying the contrapositive of the rule to what we're told about the current framework, we can derive that the current framework is not "dependable". Let's look for an answer like that.