Logical Reasoning

PT144 · S3 · Q24 Many homeowners regularly add

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Many homeowners regularly add commercial fertilizers to their lawns and gardens to maintain a healthy balance of nutrients in soil.

Statements

conditionals Widely available fertilizer → only Macro

Long term health → Macro + Micro for soil

causal Raking up glass clippings depletes the Micro from the soil, while letting grass clippings decay does not.

fact Many homeowners regularly add widely available fertilizer in the hopes of obtaining long term health for their soil.

Evaluate

There are a lot of overlapping terms ... commercial (widely available) fertilizers ... long term healthy soil ... macro ... micro.

This suggests that there are rules to be chained together or facts to apply these rules to.

We know many people are using fertilizers, hoping to get long term soil health. Yet we're told a story that fertilizers only give you half of what you need for soil health (macronutrients). You also need micronutrients, which fertilizers don't provide.

Meanwhile, we find out that raking up grass clippings takes the micronutrients out of our lawns.

Goal

So, it seems like we'd be synthesizing things by saying "These people who are using fertilizer better not rake up their clippings, or else they'll be doing one thing good for healthy soil (giving it macronutrients) but doing something that's bad for healthy soil (robbing it of micronutrients).

24.

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

  1. There is no single fertilizer

    Too Strong: no fertilizer

    There's no widely available commercial fertilizer that has both. But there might be some narrowly available professional / scientific / government fertilizer that does both.

    2% picked this

  2. The macronutrients nitrogen, phosphorus, and

    Too Strong

    Too Strong: only Only One Mentioned ? Only One Just because Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium are the only macronutrients in commercial fertilizers doesn't mean that we can say that Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium are only found in commercial fertilizers. (It should make us nervous when we're picking an answer that sounds like a rephrasing of one of the facts, since the correct answer almost always fuses multiple facts together)

    1% picked this

  3. Correct

    Widely available commercial fertilizers are

    Why this is right

    This is similar to the prediction of, "These fertilizer users better not be raking up their clippings". We can more formally look at the conditional/causal logic of it all. First we have to accept that there's a binary between picking (raking) up clippings vs. not picking them up, leaving them to decay and return to the soil. Where can be a sufficient condition, so this is saying "If grass clippings aren't allowed to decay", which is the same as "If clippings are raked up". Clipping micro healthy soil raked up ? nutrients ? not get depleted maintained Since widely available commercial fertilizers don't put any micronutrients into the soil, they have no power to stop this causal chain. We could have just as easily said "Hot dogs are not alone sufficient to maintain a healthy balance of nutrients where clippings get raked up", assuming hot dogs don't put micronutrients into the soil.

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

    73% picked this

  4. For soil to remain healthy

    Too Strong: requires commercial F's

    Healthy soil requires micro and macro nutrients. Is the only way to get micro and macro nutrients combining commercial fertilizers and grass clippings? No, similar to (A), there might be a single fertilizer that can do it all by itself (a noncommercial one). Or maybe we could use bat poop instead of commercial fertilizer. As long as there might be other sources of macronutrients besides commercial fertilizers, we don't need to use commercial fertilizers to get healthy soil.

    20% picked this

  5. Homeowners who rake up their

    Too Strong: unable

    Those who rake up clippings are definitely doing something disadvantageous to the long term health of their soil, but they could potentially make up for that by treating their soil in some other way that provides it with micronutrients.

    4% picked this

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