Logical Reasoning

PT18 · S2 · Q11 Since 1945 pesticide use in the United States

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Since 1945 pesticide use in the United States has increased tenfold despite an overall stability in number of acres planted.

Background Fact

Pesticide use has gone up ten times as much as it was in 1945. Overall acres have stayed around the same.

Surprising Claim

Crop loss from insects has doubled since 1945.

Evaluate / Goal

Given that we're using 10 times as much pesticides on the same amount of farmland, how is it that we're getting twice as much crop loss from insects?

Do pesticides wear out effectiveness, like antibiotics, if you use them too much?

Have the types of crop pests changed, such that this new group isn't as vulnerable to pesticides?

Are we using 10 times as much, but applying them in a dumber, less effective fashion?

11.

Which one of the following, if true, contributes most to explaining the paradoxical findings above?

Extension agents employed by state
No Impact
Whether they advised less/same/more, we know the reality is that 10 times as much was used, so this answer isn't giving us a way to explain how that much pesticide could allow twice as much crop loss to pests.
8% picked this
Correct
While pesticide-resistant strains of insects
Why this is right
This answer provides two separate causal mechanisms for why we have more crop loss, despite so much more pesticide: 1. insects have been developing resistance to pesticides, so it doesn't matter how much pesticide we use on those critters. It doesn't hurt them, so they just stay and munch our crops. 2. Farmers abandoned crop rotation, which was previously a method of controlling crop pests. The rest of the answer just adds a bunch of detail about why crop rotation helped guard against crop pests as well as what led to farmers abandoning crop rotation, but we don't really care about all those extraneous details. The functionality of this answer is all we care about. - Farmers stopped doing crop rotation (they stopped doing something that reduced crop loss to insects) - Insects started resisting insecticide (so even though we're using 10 times as much, it doesn't affect them) This explains how we could still have more crop loss nowadays.
Skill tested: Paradox · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
80% picked this
Since 1970 the pesticides most
No Impact
This does give us a change in pesticides ... if we're using 10 times as much pesticide but this new pesticide is crappy, then that could explain why we have even more crop damage than before. But, this answer choice said that this new pesticide is equally effective against insects, so it doesn't help us at all to explain why using 10 times as much insect poison is coexisting with twice as much insect-caused crop damage.
3% picked this
Because farmers’ decisions about how
No Impact / No Difference
This gives us some backstory into some of the considerations farmers think about when deciding on amount of pesticide, but this doesn't show us anything that has changed since 1945, and we already know how much pesticide has been used (10 times as much, for a similar area of land).
6% picked this
Although some pesticides can be
No Impact
This gives some info that would potentially suggest that some farmers might not want to use as much pesticide, since some consumers will boycott produce containing too much pesticides. But this answer doesn't speak to anything that's changed since 1945, and it's not like we can use this answer to say "there's twice as much damage from insects, because farmers don't want to use insecticide, because consumers will boycott their products." We already know as a fact that the farmers HAVE used 10 times as much pesticide. We need a way to explain how, given that, there could still be twice as much crop damage from pests.
3% picked this

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