Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Hard

PT155 S3 P2 Q13 Explanation

ILC's Draft Articles

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TopicsInferenceLaw

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Passage

With rapidly expanding populations, growing industrial development, and dwindling water supplies on national and regional levels, water is fast replacing oil as the world’s most valuable resource. Meanwhile, the growing importance of water in geopolitical affairs has increased the potential for international conflict over water resources. Thus as development and other threats Nations’ International Law Commission (ILC) to develop a treaty structure for the uses of international watercourses.

The ILC’s Draft Articles on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses are an attempt to codify the customary principles of international water law as those principles are manifested in past legal decisions and currently accepted international practice. The Draft Articles are intended as a set of guidelines for the watercourse should be equitable and reasonable, and that nations should work for the protection of ecosystems.

Though the Draft Articles are a significant step forward in the formulation of legal principles for the protection and regulation of international rivers, they are inadequate because they do not provide satisfactory ways of dealing with possible future environmental changes. One significant environmental threat to the world’s rivers is the increase of from increased runoff due to snowmelt or, more importantly, from decreased precipitation in many regions.

Treaties that allocate fixed amounts of water to various countries based on current usage, as suggested by the Draft Articles, will not be flexible enough to respond to these large fluctuations in river flows. Once specific water rights are allocated along a river in accordance with the Draft Articles, nations would have climate changes, such as how reduced flows will be allocated among the countries sharing a river.

What this question is testing

Inference

Your task

Find what must be true based on what the passage or stimulus states.

Common trap

Answers that are plausible or likely but not actually guaranteed by the text.

Winning move

Keep only the choice the statements fully support — eliminate anything that requires an extra assumption.

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question
13.

The passage most strongly suggests that which one of the following was true at the time the ILC began

Answer choices

  1. Too Specific: most5% picked this

    Water resources were sufficiently abundant to meet the needs of most of the countries belonging

    We have no idea whether 51% or more of UN nations had adequate water supplies.

  2. Out of Scope: precipitation decline4% picked this

    Precipitation levels throughout the world had been declining steadily for a

    The first paragraph makes no mention of declining participation.

  3. Too Strong11% picked this

    Existing treaties governing water rights rarely covered matters involving

    Too Strong: rarely Too Broad: environmental protection Nothing in the first paragraph would allow us to say that under 50% of existing treaties that cover water rights deal with environmental protection aspects. We know there's a need for legal protection concerning water rights of international rivers, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's because most existing treaties fail to cover environmental protection. There might only be a handful of existing treaties, but most of them deal with environmental protection. There might be a ton of existing treaties, and most of them deal with environmental protection, but don't cover all the issues that ILC wants to address with international rivers.

  4. Too Strong: escalating sharply24% picked this

    Conflicts over the management of water resources had been escalating sharply in

    The first paragraph says that the potential for international conflict has increased, but it doesn't say that actual conflicts have escalated sharply in frequency and intensity.

  5. Correct56% picked this

    Much of the content of the Draft Articles had already been articulated by courts resolving

    Why this is right

    This is supported by the first sentence of the second paragraph. Since the Draft Articles are trying to "codify the customary principles of international water law as those principles are manifested in past legal decisions", we can say that much of the DA is just aggregating the sort of legal takeaways we've accumulated through past legal decisions.

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

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