September 2014 LSAT Section 2 Question 11

Municipal legislator: The mayor proposes that the city accept a lighting company's gift of several high- tech streetl...

Ame15 on July 8, 2020

Why B?

How are you able to come to the conclusion that the answer is B? It makes sense that it is B, but I feel like Main Conclusion questions usually have the exact sentence pulled out from the paragraph. Answer B feels more like an inference.

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shunhe on July 10, 2020

Hi @Ame15,

Thanks for the question! Well, let’s take a look at the structure of this argument. We’re told that the mayor proposes the city accept some gift of streetlights. And then the legislator says there’s no problem in accepting them even though the some people think the company wants to influence the city’s decisions about park lighting contracts. He supports this with two reasons: (1) the only ulterior motive is to show it off to visiting mayors who are coming for some event, and (2) favoritism in contracts is prevented by the bidding procedure.

So now we’re asked for the conclusion, and here, it’s clear that the argument is building towards the idea that the legislator thinks that there’s no problem in accepting the gift. And this is what (B) says, that the mayor’s proposal to accept the gift shouldn’t be considered problematic. So it’s not really an inference, it’s a rephrasing of the second sentence of the stimulus. It’s not always going to be the case that the sentence is pulled out exactly; you have to look for the idea that matches the best, and that’s (B).

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.