Logical Reasoning

PT142 · S4 · Q13 Mayor: To keep our neighborhoods clean

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Mayor: To keep our neighborhoods clean, every street in town will be swept at least once a month.

Statements

Every street in town will be swept at least once a month.

If a neighborhood needs to be swept more than once a month, that neighborhood will be qualified for interim sweepings.

All requests from interim sweepings from qualified neighborhoods will be satisfied immediately.

Evaluate

All three sentences are conditional in nature ("every / if / all"), so we should be checking to see whether any of these conditionals chain together.

In this case, only the 2nd and 3rd would seem to be connectable.

If your neighborhood needs more than one sweeping in a month, it will qualify for interim sweeping, and thus it will get swept immediately..

Goal

Look for anything provable. It might deal with combining the 2nd and 3rd statements, since they have an overlapping concept (qualify for interim sweepings)..

13.

If all of the mayor's statements are true, then which one of the following must also be true?

  1. All neighborhoods in which construction

    Too Strong: all

    This says that we can derive a conditional that says, If construction ? then a neighborhood is under way is qualified We don't have any triggers that match "if construction is under way". There's no way for us to say that 100% of neighborhoods where construction is taking place are qualified neighborhoods. Construction was brought up as an example of one situation in which a neighborhood might need more frequent sweeping due to excessive dirt from major construction. It didn't say that all neighborhoods with any construction have excessive dirt and need more frequent cleanings.

    2% picked this

  2. All qualified neighborhoods will get

    Too Strong: will

    This answer is somewhat tempting, but a qualified neighborhood isn't automatically getting a second sweeping per month. We only know that if a qualified neighborhood requests an interim sweeping that they will get their streets swept more than once a month. There could be qualified neighborhoods that never request (and thus never get) the interim sweeping. So it's too strong to say that all qualified neighborhoods will automatically get extra sweepings. We could have picked an answer saying all qualified neighborhoods can get swept more than once per month.

    3% picked this

  3. No street will be swept

    Illegal Negation

    We know that "if a street is part of a qualified neighborhood, then it can get swept more than once". This answer is twisting that into "if a street is not part of a qualified neighborhood, then it cannot get swept more than once". Being designated a "qualified neighborhood" is the only case we heard about in which a street would get an extra sweeping, but that doesn't mean it's the only case in existence.

    6% picked this

  4. Correct

    A qualified neighborhood that requests

    Why this is right

    This combines all three ideas in the paragraph (the correct answer doesn't need to combine all the provided facts, but it almost always combines at least 2 claims). We know that every street by default gets at least one sweeping per month, and we know that if a qualified neighborhood requests sweepings then it will get an interim (additional) sweeping. So we can say that when a qualified neighborhood requests an interim sweeping, they end up getting an interim sweeping. And an "interim" sweeping by definition means "in the interim between this month's and next month's regularly scheduled cleaning". So any time you get an interim sweeping, you're getting more than one sweeping in a month,

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

    86% picked this

  5. No street in an unqualified

    Illegal Negation

    We know that "if a street is part of a qualified neighborhood, then it can get swept more than once". This answer is twisting that into "if a street is not part of a qualified neighborhood, then it cannot get swept more than once". Being designated a "qualified neighborhood" is the only case we heard about in which a street would get an extra sweeping, but that doesn't mean it's the only case in existence. It's possible that a street in an unqualified neighborhood gets an extra cleaning. Nothing in this paragraph rules out that possibility.

    3% picked this

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