Logical Reasoning

PT142 · S1 · Q3 Editorial: The government should

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Editorial: The government should not fund any part of its health services with lottery revenue.

Conclusion (should)

The government should not fund any part of its health services with lottery revenue.

Evidence

The health services are essential to the community.

Lottery revenue could decline in the future and leave the government scrambling to cover a shortfall.

Evaluate

When we're prephrasing a principle to match our argument, we're basically thinking "If Premise, then Conclusion."

It should be a principle that would apply to how the government funds its health services. It should direct us to not fund health services with lotto revenue.

The concern from the Premise is that lotto revenue is unstable whereas health services are essential. Synthesizing those two ideas would sound like

Goal

Look for a rule talking about what we know about lotto revenue (could decline at some time in the future, causing a budget shortfall), what we know about health services (they're essential), and pointing us in the direction that those two things shouldn't go together.

3.

The argument in the editorial most closely conforms to which one of the following principles?

  1. Governments should spend more of

    Out of Scope

    Out of Scope (nonessential services) Bad Conclusion Match The editorial never compares spending on essential services with spending on nonessential ones. It is about which source of money should pay for one essential service, not about how much to spend on essentials versus extras. Spending more on essential would mean spending more on health services. The author was never asking us to spend more on health services. She was asking us to avoid funding health services with lotto money.

    0% picked this

  2. Correct

    Essential government services must be

    Why this is right

    By contrapositive, this says "if it's an unreliable source of revenue, then you can't use it to fund an essential government service." Lotto revenue was "an unreliable source of revenue", since it could decline and lead to a budget shortfall. And health services are an essential government service. So this rule matches the reasoning flow. "If it's an unreliable source, such as the lotto, then you can't use it to fund an essential government service, like health services."

    Skill tested: Principle-Conform · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    97% picked this

  3. No government service should be

    Too Weak

    This principle says we can't get 100% of our health services funding from lotto revenue. But it would tolerate us getting 90% of our funding from the lotto. That doesn't match the author's conclusion. He doesn't think lotto revenue should fund any part of health services.

    2% picked this

  4. Governments should consider all health

    Premise Support

    The editorial already treats these health services as essential. A principle telling governments to classify health services that way just restates that premise. The "should" in our principle needs to be about how the government should go about funding health services.

    0% picked this

  5. At least some lottery revenue

    Unrelated to Goal

    The author ain't tryna use lotto money for nothin', far as we know. His argument isn't about where we should stash some lotto revenue. His argument was designed to convince us that we should never use lotto money to fund our public health services.

    1% picked this

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