Council member: The profits of downtown businesses will increase if more consumers live in the downtown area, and a ...

shunhe on August 19, 2020

Hi @Tegan,

Thanks for the question! Let me walk you through a diagramming of these premises. The first premise tells us that the profits of downtown business will increase if more consumers live in the downtown area. This is a pretty simple “if then” statement, so this is just

More consumers live in downtown area —> Profits of downtown businesses increase

So now for the next premise, which is the second half of the first sentence. A decree in the cost of living in the downtown area will guarantee that the number of consumers living there will increase. Well, “guarantee” means that what’s coming after is necessary when the thing coming before happens, so it introduces the necessary condition. So this gets diagrammed

Decrease in cost of living downtown —> More consumers live in downtown area

And reframing this in if-then language makes sense; if the costs of living decrease, then we know for sure that more consumers will live there.

Last sentence tells us that the profits of downtown businesses won’t increase unless downtown traffic congestion decreases. This is an “unless” statement, and one way to think of “unless” is “if not.” So we can diagram this

~Downtown traffic congestion decreases —> ~Profits of downtown businesses increase

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