Logical Reasoning

PT153 · S2 · Q1 In situations where it is difficult

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In situations where it is difficult to make informed decisions about products, consumers should be provided with the relevant information.

Setup

Principle If it's difficult to make an informed decision about a product, consumers should be provided with the relevant information.

Example It was difficult to decide whether a given food product had nutritious ingredients, until we required food manufacturers to print nutritional info on the package.

Analogy Similarly, consumers want to make an informed decision about conserving energy, and it's difficult for consumers to determine how much energy was required to make a product.

The Blank

We know we're looking for a Conclusion that can be drawn, because the setup here was:

Since there's no easy way, .

Any time since/because starts off a sentence, then the second clause in the sentence is a conclusion supported by the first clause.

Evaluate

Like so many Fill-in-the-Blank questions, this one wants us to Complete the Analogy. We want to "carry over" what he heard about in the example of nutritional information on food products to what we're now talking about in relation to energy.

We're operating by this principle that says, .

It wasn't easy to decide if food products had nutritious ingredients, so manufacturers were required to print nutritional info on the packaging.

It's not easy to decide how much energy went into manufacturing a product, so manufacturers should be required to put information about how much energy it took to manufacture a product on the packaging.

Goal

We can be flexible about "required" and "packaging". The core component is that manufacturers should provide to consumers the relevant information about how much energy was used to make a product.

1.

Which one of the following most logically completes the argument?

  1. consumers who are informed of

    Unrelated to Goal

    We're looking for a statement about what manufacturers should provide, or about what consumers should be provided with. manufacturers should provide to consumers the relevant information about how much energy was used to make a product. This answer is a statement about what consumers should choose.

    1% picked this

  2. manufacturers should use less energy

    Unrelated to Goal

    We're looking for a statement about what information manufacturers should provide, or about what information consumers should be provided with. manufacturers should provide to consumers the relevant information about how much energy was used to make a product. This answer is a statement about how much energy manufacturers should use.

    0% picked this

  3. providing consumers with information about

    Out of Scope

    Out of Scope: reduce impact of fossil fuels This starts off on the right foot, but we should just be saying, "Providing consumers with information about the energy used to produce a product should happen". We don't have any grounds for taking this conversation into the zone of what impact such information would have on fossil fuels. This would only work if in the food-half of the analogy we had heard that, "Once consumers had information about nutrition, they started eating more nutritious foods".

    1% picked this

  4. consumers should demand products that

    Unrelated to Goal

    We're looking for a statement about what information manufacturers should provide, or about what information consumers should be provided with. manufacturers should provide to consumers the relevant information about how much energy was used to make a product. This answer is a statement about what sort of products consumers should demand.

    1% picked this

  5. Correct

    manufacturers should be required to

    Why this is right

    This completes the analogy, without going overboard into anything new or undiscussed. manufacturers should provide to consumers the relevant information about how much energy was used to make a product. They actually stuck very close to the food-nutrition example, in which the relevant information that consumers wanted was "required to be put on the packaging".

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

    98% picked this

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