December 2015 LSAT Section 2 Question 10

One year ago, a municipality banned dishwasher detergents containing phosphates. Anecdotal evidence indicates that ma...

iris.diaz823 on September 29, 2020

Why not B?

I was between C and B. I chose a B because I thought the argument was that people had switched to phosphate free detergents and this had contributed to the reduction of phosphates in the municipal water. Knowing what other pollutants are in the phosphate free detergent would allow you to see if the t detergent is actually present in the municipal water and determine that it was in fact the increased use of the phosphate free detergent which led to the decrease of the phosphates.

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shunhe on September 30, 2020

Hi @iris.diaz823,

Thanks for the question! So what is the stimulus telling us? Basically, we’re being told that a municipality banned dishwasher detergents with phosphates. But apparently, people still bought them from out of town and brought them in. Despite that, some people switched to phosphate-free detergents, and now there’s less phosphate pollution.

So now we’re asked for an answer that would help us evaluate the above argument. Let’s take a look at (B), which asks which pollutants, if any, are present in phosphate-free dishwashing detergents. This is irrelevant to our current argument. We just care about phosphate pollution, so other types of pollution don’t really matter for the sake of this argument. And that is what makes (B) wrong, we just don’t care about the other types of pollution.

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