Logical Reasoning

PT151 · S4 · Q16 Tenants who do not have to pay

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Tenants who do not have to pay their own electricity bills do not have a financial incentive to conserve electricity.

Conclusion

If more landlords put electricity meters on individual apartments, so that tenants can be billed for their personal electricity, energy will be conserved as a result.

Evidence

Presently, tenants who don't have to pay individual electricity bills don't have a financial incentive to conserve electricity.

Evaluate

Our author is making a Plan / Prediction and assuming a difference in this new world. He thinks that once people can see their own energy bill and have a financial incentive to use less energy, they will use less energy.

How could this fail to be true? - maybe they're already conserving as much as they can (not because of financial incentives, but because of environmental conscientiousness)

- maybe they're wealthy enough that even with a financial incentive to use less energy, they choose not to.

- maybe they would never look at the electricity meters and thus wouldn't really get a sense for how much they were using.

Goal

Look for an answer suggesting that something doesn't change in the way the author was assuming (i.e. people don't start thinking about their energy usage more and using less as a result), or an answer that otherwise makes it seem like we'll end up using just as much energy under this new plan.

16.

Which one of the following, if true, most weakens the argument?

  1. Tenants who do not have

    Irrelevant to Plan

    In the plan-world we're trying to analyze, tenants would be paying their own electricity bills, so this is totally irrelevant to that world. The only possible weakening effect this might seem to have would be undermining the author's premise, suggesting that "tenants who don't have to pay their electricity bills do have a financial incentive, because the less they use electricity, the less their rent would be?" That last connection is far too tenuous to use. We know landlords aren't updating rent from month to month based on how much energy their tenants used.

    18% picked this

  2. Many initiatives have been implemented

    Strengthens, if anything

    This is a broad, weak idea and it would have no particular effect on Current World vs. Plan World. If we were forcing it to be relevant, it would potentially make it seem like people have been exposed to the idea of saving money through energy conservation. So that would make it somewhat more likely that if they suddenly had to pay for their own energy, then would conserve.

    2% picked this

  3. Correct

    Landlords who pay for their

    Why this is right

    This is trying to suggest an important difference about Plan World vs. Current World. In our current world, these landlords pay for the electricity, and so they usually would install energy efficient appliances (like the fridge / the washer / the dryer). This correct answer wants us to think that if landlords were no longer paying for tenants' electricity, then they wouldn't have strong incentive to install energy efficient appliances, and so they wouldn't install them. If apartments that had individual energy meters also had old-school energy wasting appliances, then even if tenants were trying to conserve energy, the more wasteful appliances would end up annulling that difference. It's a pretty obnoxious correct answer in terms of what it's asking us to assume in order for it to have impact. We need to use our outside knowledge a little bit to think about how energy efficient appliances tend to be more expensive (otherwise, why wouldn't landlords continue to buy them, even if landlords aren't paying everyone's energy bill).

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

    57% picked this

  4. Some tenant dwellings can only

    No Impact

    This idea would potentially be fighting the trigger and saying, "Hey, author, landlords aren't going to be able to switch to having individuals pay their own electricity, because the necessary rewiring would be prohibitively pricey." But with conditional conclusions, we just go along with the trigger as an accepted constraint of the argument. We can't strengthen a conditional conclusion by making the trigger seem more likely to be true or weaken it by making the trigger seem less likely. (and even if we could, the "some" would be way to weak to undermine the trigger)

    6% picked this

  5. Some people conserve energy for

    Too Weak

    The word "Some" means "at least one". Answers with the strength of "at least one data point is X" are almost never correct on Strengthen, Weaken, or Paradox. Does it hurt the argument if we say "at least one person conserves energy for non-financial reasons"? Not much. We would need to know that so many people are already conserving energy that if more landlords switched to this individual pay system, there wouldn't be anyone who starts using less energy. i.e., even if 90% of apartment dwellers already conserve as much energy as they can for environmental reasons, the 10% who don't might conserve more energy if they had to start paying for it, and as long as "energy will be conserved as a result", the author wins his conclusion.

    18% picked this

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