Q15 - Industries waste large amounts of

[sportsfan8491]

This is a relatively straight forward flaw description question. We are given information that says that water is a valuable resource and industries apparently don't pay that much money to use it, if they even pay anything at all. After reading these first two sentences, I was expecting a conclusion about some sort of protectionist policy to help with water conservation.

The argument then concludes that requiring companies or organizations to pay full price would DEFINITIVELY STOP them from using water inefficiently and it would happen soon. Wait a minute, this conclusion goes way too far! There are multinational corporations that have very deep coffers, and for these companies or organizations their water expense might still just be a small "drop in the bucket" (pardon the pun here) after the supposed increase. So, although I think this protectionist policy of higher prices might help with and have some impact on conservation efforts, I don't think it would stop the inefficient use of water by industries altogether.

Another thing I kept a close eye on was the lack of detail provided in the terms "pay little or nothing" vs. "pay full price for water". What if full price is only a fraction of a cent higher? I guess this would be more for a weaken/strengthen question type of consideration, but I had both of these points in mind when I went to the answers.

A) is wrong because the argument never says that requiring industries to pay full price is THE ONLY way for inefficient water use to be curtailed or prevented. It is proposed as one possible solution, but it's NOT presented as the only solution. There's a pretty big and obvious distinction between these two ideas here.

B) is wrong because inefficient is taken to mean wasteful, so it's perfectly in-line with everything that is being said in the argument and it should not be interpreted ambiguously at all.

C) Ah-ha, here we go. This is the point I mentioned above about how the conclusion goes to a ludicrous extreme. We don't know for sure that implementing this new protectionist policy of higher prices would definitely "soon cease inefficient water use altogether", because the evidence we're given is hardly strong enough to make this bold predictive conclusion. Remember, we don't know anything about the actual price of the water and this new policy could only involve a fraction of a penny increase in the price, which wouldn't even cause the big multinational conglomerates to flinch, let alone be worried for even a split second.

D) is wrong because it's way off. The premises have a distinctly different meaning than the conclusion.

E) is wrong because the considerations are relevant to the argument, just they're not very detailed and the argument goes way too far in the conclusion that it makes. Be careful NOT to confuse "not relevant" with "not detailed"; they're two very different concepts and I'm sure by question 15 the test writers are trying to test whether some individuals will overlook this distinction.

I hope this helps.

[ohthatpatrick]

FANTASTIC explanation!

Just to clarify for others what was meant for (D):

"assumes what it sets out to prove"
"presupposes what is seeks to establish"
"the conclusion is a restatement of the premise"

These are all phrases that mean Circular Reasoning. That's the flaw when your premise and conclusion are essentially saying the same thing.

That's why SportsFan pointed out that, in this argument, the premise and conclusion are clearly distinct.

Nice work.