Q4 - Columnist: A government-owned water utility

[mshinners]

Question Type:
Principle Support (Strengthen/Sufficient)

Stimulus Breakdown:
Judgment: Using the dam money to build new roads is unacceptable.
Situation: There are two proposals. One is to add a water charge to build a dam. The other is to add a water charge to build new roads.

Answer Anticipation:
Money collected should be used to pay for something related to how it was collected. (In other words, it's unacceptable to use money collected by "taxing" something for an unrelated project.)

Correct answer:
(E)

Answer choice analysis:
(A) Out of scope. The argument doesn't address whether or not people would be informed of what the money is being used for. The proposal may be acceptable if the people are told.

(B) Out of scope. There hasn't been any designation of money yet, so this answer doesn't apply. Also, it seems as if both a dam and roads would benefit the entire community (or, at least, neither would benefit everyone).

(C) Out of scope. There's no discussion of which projects the customers approve of.

(D) Out of scope. The conclusion is about whether it would be acceptable to use the money for roads, not about whether it's acceptable to collect it. The collection has already been approved.

(E) Bingo. Additional money shouldn't be collected by the water company if it's not going to be used for, in this case, a dam. It's interesting to note that the LSAT here is using "should not" to justify something being "unacceptable." Remember - the LSAT does connect the ideas of "not acceptable" with "should not".

Takeaway/Pattern:
There are very few implicit premises on the LSAT, and when they are used, they're related to the definitions of those words. Here, we can see an implicit premise related to the definition of "should".

#officialexplanation

[kenyamlee]

I struggled with this answer because the question asked why the proposal was unacceptable. From that standpoint there is only one proposal. I know the breakdown above says there are 2 but the first suggestion was already approved. In that sense it is hard to call it a proposal.

So in my answering the questions, I immediately gravitated toward E but I changed my answer because B addressed the proposal specifically.

How should I deal with this mental debate? E is principle that addresses what has already taken place, not what is being proposed.

[ohthatpatrick]

You're definitely right that we shouldn't be calling both of these proposals. I think he just used that term in his mental breakdown of "The Situation", but the argument isn't saying there are two proposals.

The only proposal is the idea that "we take that additional money collected an spend it on roads, not a dam". We need an answer to convince us that we shouldn't do that.

(E) convinces us we shouldn't do that, because it reads "If a water utility is collecting an additional charge, it should be using that money for water-related expenditures."

(B) would only work as a reason against spending money on roads, not a dam, if we knew that "A dam benefits a whole community" while "roads only benefit some members of a community".

Since we don't know that (and it seems implausible, since they're both infrastructure, which presumably benefits the entire community), we can't use (B) to help us pick between "spend the extra money on a dam" vs. "spend the extra money on roads".

With (E), we just have to ask ourselves, "Do we know that new roads are NOT a water-related expenditure?"

That seems more within our current knowledge than the speculative thought we would need to make (B) go anywhere.

Hope this helps.

[ZaftigG65]

I fail to see how you could have anticipated this answer. The best "anticipation" I could have considered was "It is unacceptable to use money for roads if it has been designated for a dam". Which wasn't the correct answer here. Answer B starts off great but ends terrible and E is the only obviously acceptable one although this was a real curve ball put in right at the beginning.

[MinjinC831]

I ended up selected answer choice E, but almost didn't because I wondered if building new roads could've actually helped the water supply in some way? Am I reading too much into this answer choice?