Logical Reasoning

PT144 · S2 · Q17 City leader: If our city adopts the new

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City leader: If our city adopts the new tourism plan, the amount of money that tourists spend here annually will increase by at least $2 billion, creating as many jobs as a new automobile manufacturing plant would.

Statements

Conditional (If)

adopt new → tourists would spend an tourism plan extra $2 billion annually

Causal (-ing)

The extra $2 billion being spent by tourists would create as many jobs as a new car plant.

Comparison / Pivot (but)

Adopting the tourism plan would cost less than convincing an auto manufacturer to build a car plant here.

Judgment

It would be reasonable for the city to spend what it would take to convince an auto manufacturer to build a plant here.

Evaluate

This is a weird variety of facts. We have a couple facts about the tourism plan a couple facts about building a car plant, so maybe the synthesis they want us to do has to do with comparing the two.

Whenever the last claim of the paragraph begins with a Pivot word (but, yet, however), that typically means that LSAT intends for us to reconcile that last idea with what came before it.

What should we make out of the fact that the tourism plan would cost less (than it would to entice an auto manufacturer to our city)?

Well we know that the tourism plan would create as many jobs as the new car plant would. So I guess we could say something like, .

Goal

Pick the most provable answer we can find. It might relate to the idea that the tourism plan would get us at least as many jobs but for less money than would getting an auto manufacturer to build a plant here.

17.

The city leader's statements, if true, provide the most support for which one of the following?

  1. The city should implement the

    Too Strong: least expensive

    We only know about two job creation measures, and we know that the tourism plan is the less expensive of the two. We don't know anything about the least expensive measure available, so we have no support for saying the city should implement that one.

    15% picked this

  2. In general, it is reasonable

    Too Strong

    Too Strong: manufacturing in general One-Claim Support We were told it would be reasonable to spend money to try to convince an auto manufacturer to build a plant in the city. But we don't know if it's reasonable to convince most manufacturing plants to build in the city. Maybe auto plants are more appealing because they create more jobs than other manufacturing plants would. Maybe other manufacturing plants have a lot more pollution. Since we're only told about auto manufacturing, we can't speculate about what would be true for manufacturing, in general. We should be nervous picking this answer since it would only involve one-claim as support. The correct answer to an inference question will almost always involve combining 2 or more claims.

    8% picked this

  3. The city cannot afford both

    Out of Scope: can't afford both

    We don't have any grounds for saying that the city doesn't have enough money to do both things: the new tourism plan and trying to convince a car manufacturer to locate here. The fact that we're discussing both options doesn't imply that we will be choosing exactly one of them (we might choose neither, we might choose both).

    12% picked this

  4. Correct

    It would be reasonable for

    Why this is right

    We can support this. It's not definitely true, but it's supportable. We were told that it would be reasonable for the city to spend money to convince the auto manufacturer to build a plant here. And we're told that the tourism plan costs less but would create as many jobs. If it's reasonable to spend X dollars to create Y jobs, then wouldn't it be reasonable to spend less-than-X dollars to create Y jobs?

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

    65% picked this

  5. The only way the city

    Contradicted

    We could either say this is too strong because we were never told that the new tourism plan is the only way to create jobs. Or we could say this is contradicted by the fact that we could potentially create jobs by convincing an automobile manufacturer to build a plant here.

    0% picked this

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