Town councillor: The only reason for the town to have ordinances restricting where skateboarding can be done would...

Mehran on March 31, 2018

@hallerae okay so let's break down the method of reasoning in the stimulus in abstract terms first.

The stimulus sets forth the policy behind taking a certain action (ordinances restricting where you can skateboard).

It then proceeds to tell us that taking action A (prohibiting skateboarding in town's River Park) while consistent with the policy, would cause action B (skateboarding in the streets), which is actually worse in terms of the policy (skateboarding in streets more dangerous than skateboarding in the park), and concludes based on this that we should avoid taking action A.

Now let's compare this to (B):

Policy behind insecticides is to protect against insect damage.

But using insecticides against aphids that damage tomato crops should be avoided because these insecticides kill wasps that prey on insecticide-resistant pets which damage tomato crops more than aphids do.

Notice that this is the exact same reasoning structure as we encountered in the stimulus so (B) would be the correct answer.

Let's compare that with (E). Notice in (E) we are given the policy behind one-way streets (accelerate the flow of traffic) but we are then informed that doing this on South Main Street would be detrimental.

Notice you do not have two different actions here, one of which is worse in terms of the policy than the other, like we saw in the stimulus and (B). So (E) would be eliminated.

Hope that helps! Please let us know if you have any other questions.

mjafri21 on October 16, 2019

Would you need to diagram this question, or would it be simpler to just use the reasoning and structure?