Shortly after the Persian Gulf

Answer choices

1. A

   Unclear Impact3% picked this

   Oil contaminants have greater environmental effects in temperate regions than in

   One red flag here is that we never talked about "desert regions" and so in order to make this answer relevant you'd have to know that the Persian Gulf involves a 'desert region'. LSAT never tests outside knowledge like that. You don't need to know geography or history of wars to answer these questions. This answer might seem a little appealing because if temperate regions like the Baltic Sea tend to have bad looking oil metrics, then it wouldn't be surprising if post-war Persian Gulf looked comparable to the Baltic Sea areas. But we were only told that PAHs were comparable, and we were told those were "relatively low" (compared to average PAHs for an oil producing region, presumably). So this answer does not seem to be useful.

   3%
2. B

   Deepens Paradox, if Anything7% picked this

   Oil contamination and PAH pollution dissipate more rapidly in temperate regions than

   Again, it's extremely unlikely that the correct answer would require that students know that the Persian Gulf war took place in a desert region. But this goes in the opposite direction of what we'd like. Since we're trying to explain why the oil contamination and PAH metrics don't look as bad as we would have expected them to look for the postwar Persian Gulf, it would help us to say, "Sure stuff was bad during the war, but the bad stuff dissipates quickly thereafter." This instead, is suggesting that the bad stuff dissipates more slowly in desert regions like the Persian Gulf.

   7%
3. C

   No Impact38% picked this

   Oil contamination and PAH pollution dissipate more rapidly in desert regions than

   Again, it's extremely unlikely that the correct answer would require that students know that the Persian Gulf war took place in a desert region. This does go in the direction we'd like, compared to (B). Since we're trying to explain why the oil contamination and PAH metrics don't look as bad as we would have expected them to look for the postwar Persian Gulf, it would help us to say, "Sure stuff was bad during the war, but the bad stuff dissipates quickly thereafter." The problem is that this is a comparison between temperate and desert; it's not saying that bad stuff dissipates quickly in the desert, just that it dissipates more quickly than it would in a temperate region. However, the crux of our paradox isn't that we need to explain a difference between the Persian Gulf and Baltic Sea areas. The paradox is mainly, "Given all the bad oil stuff that happened during the war, how come postwar Persian Gulf has less oil contamination than prewar Persian Gulf?" This answer does nothing to address that because prewar Persian Gulf and postwar Persian Gulf are both desert regions. If oil contaminants dissipated really quickly, that could explain why postwar looks comparable to prewar. But this answer has no power to explain why postwar looks better (less oil contamination) than prewar.

   38%
4. D

   Correct46% picked this

   Peacetime oil production and transport in the Persian Gulf result in high levels of PAHs

   Why this is right

   This allows us a storyline in which postwar could look cleaner / less contaminated than prewar: even though there were fires and spills during the war that would make us expect high PAHs and lots of oil contaminants, the normal production and transport of oil involves high PAHs and lots of oil contaminants. There are two little "detail crumbs" we need to help us with this answer. First of all, we need to notice that this postwar survey is shortly after the war, and that during the war regular oil production slowed down. So in a sense the comparison becomes this: During war / shortly after war ... low oil production, but lots of fires that create PAHs and lots of spills that create oil contamination. During peacetime / before the war ... regular oil production, high levels of PAHs and massive dumping (creating oil contamination). Nothin in this answer guarantees that the peacetime mix of contaminants would be worse than the wartime mix. But the answer doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to give us a usable storyline. And this lets us say that "the reason postwar surveys showed less oil contamination than prewar surveys, and the reason that the PAH marker was relatively low, is because even though there were things during the war (fires and oil spills) that increases PAHs and contaminants, that's nothing compared to how dirty the usual process of oil production is." In terms of our predictions, this answer made one of the reference points sound bad -- it makes prewar Persian Gulf seem like a dirty baseline, so that being "less dirty" after the war isn't as shocking.

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

   46%
5. E

   No Impact7% picked this

   The Persian Gulf War ended before the oil fires and spills caused as much damage

   Whether the war ended earlier than expected or before the damage could be as bad as people feared, that doesn't change the fact that there were hundreds of smoky oil fires and deliberate oil spills. So we still need to explain how a survey we took right after all that stuff happened could somehow look better than a prewar survey. Even if this answer said, "It turns out that the fires and spills during the war did no damage", then you would still expect a postwar survey to be comparable to a prewar one, not show less contamination.

   7%