Logical Reasoning

PT148 · S1 · Q4 Columnist: A government-owned water utility

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Columnist: A government-owned water utility has received approval to collect an additional charge on water bills and to use that additional revenue to build a dam.

Conclusion

The proposal to use the money we received from water bills to build new roads instead of a dam is unacceptable.

Evidence

The additional charge on water bills was approved with the idea that this additional revenue would go to building a dam.

Evaluate

On Strengthen + Principle questions, we're basically just anticipating answers by saying, "If Premise, then Conclusion".

So here that would sound like this:

if the money was being → then it's unacceptable collected to build a dam to use it for new roads

Goal

Let's look for an answer that's saying we should only use this collected money for the thing we collected it for (building a dam). We shouldn't collect the money for one purpose but then go and use it for some other purpose.

4.

Which one of the following principles, if valid, most helps to justify the columnist's judgment that the legislator's proposal is unacceptable?

  1. Customers of a utility have

    Unrelated to Goal

    This principle is about what customers have a right to know. We need a principle about what rights legislators have in terms of where they spend money that was collected for a different reason.

    1% picked this

  2. Money designated for projects that

    Weak Evidence Match

    This principle is appealingly one that would allows us to say, "Hey, you shouldn't use this money for that", which matches the conclusion well. But does our situation trigger this rule? In order to use this rule, we'd need to know that building the dam was a project that would benefit an entire community, whereas building new roads would benefit only some members of a community. Are those common sense definitions? A dam benefits an entire community, whereas new roads benefit only some members? No, they're not. A dam might benefit an entire community, if it's supplying hydroelectric power to the whole area. Or it might just prevent flooding for one area of the community, only benefiting them. New roads might be only benefiting the small subset of the community that would use those roads, or in the case of potentially widely used roads, it would benefit the whole community. Since we can't say that the switch from dam to roads is one from "everyone benefits" to "only some benefit", we can't apply this rule to our conversation.

    3% picked this

  3. An additional charge on water

    Weak Evidence Match

    This principle is appealingly one that would allows us to say, "Hey, you shouldn't use the additional charge on water bills to fund X", which matches the conclusion well. But does our situation trigger this rule? In order to use this rule to say "the additional charge should not be used to fund building new roads", we'd need to know that most of the water utility's customers disapprove of building the new roads. Since we weren't told that most of the utility's customers oppose the project to build the new roads, we can't apply this rule to our conversation.

    1% picked this

  4. An additional charge on water

    Bad Evidence Match

    This principle is about whether an additional charge should / shouldn't have been imposed. That could still potentially work for our conclusion since where we're at currently is that the utility has received approval to impose the charge, but it hasn't necessarily started yet. So a rule that said, "You shouldn't impose this charge" could still prevent the unacceptable proposal from happening. This rule says: If an additional charge on water bills hasn't → then it shouldn't been approved by be imposed the legislature That does nothing for us, since this additional charge has been approved by the legislature.

    2% picked this

  5. Correct

    A water utility should not

    Why this is right

    This answer says: If the money being collected then a water by an additional charge is → utility should not not being used for water- collect the related expenditures additional charge If a water utility collected money via an additional charge and then used it to build new roads, that would trigger this rule, since building new roads is not a water-related expenditure. So according to this rule, the utility should not collect that additional charge. That's the closest any answer choice has given us to supporting "this proposal is unacceptable". The conclusion was saying, "We should not spend the extra money from water bills to build new roads". This answer, frustratingly, is saying that the water utility shouldn't collect the charge in the first place (which is different from a rule about how we should / shouldn't spend the money once it's been collected). But this answer is still the best available. Picture one legislator standing up and saying, "You know how we approved collecting an additional charge on water bills to build a dam? What if we used that money instead to build new roads?" Someone else could stand up and say, "No, that's unacceptable. If we're not using the money for water-related expenditures, then we shouldn't be collecting it via an additional charge on people's water bills." No one should be kicking themselves for having not predicted "not used for water-related expenditures" as the trigger for the correct answer. This is just a reminder to stay flexible and ask yourself whether the trigger applies to the given situation. If it doesn't or we don't know whether it does, then the answer is useless to us. If it does, then we get the outcome idea.

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

    93% picked this

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