Methods of Reasoning Questions - - Question 16

The United States government generally tries to protect valuable natural resources. But one resource has been ignored...

cannedfun March 22, 2023

E interp

Total federal expenditures for nationwide soil conservation programs have been less than the allocations of some individual states. How can we know that we should read it as allocations (by) some states (towards soil conservation) instead of Federal spending for soil conservation versus allocations (to) some states (for whatever [education, lsat prep, etc]) If it were the second then it would be limited to federal spending, so I thought they were all bad and went with B even knowing they said some. If I said in 2023 the federal allocation for funding of California was 200B, isn't that parallel here? Would love some insight here!

Reply
Create a free account to read and take part in forum discussions.

Already have an account? log in

Emil-Kunkin March 23, 2023

I think that in this case we can read this using a common sense approach. Since we are never told what the allocations are of, we should default to the most recent antecedent, which in this case is soil conservation. More specifically, this is clearly an argument about government spending on soil conservation, we can safely understand the author as referring to soil conservation regarding state allocations.