Q4 - Over the last few decades, public outcries

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Inference

Stimulus Breakdown:
CAUSAL: Public outcries brought about stricter regluations of emissions.
CAUSAL/CONDITIONAL: The stricter regulations caused the improvement in air quality among the most polluted cities. (the improvement would not have happened without the regulations).

Answer Anticipation:
Inference questions want us to integrate information, to combine multiple ideas to derive another one, typically using CONDITIONAL, CAUSAL, QUANTITATIVE, or CONTRAST language.

Here, the causal chain we could get by combining the ideas says:
public outcries --> stricter regulations --> cities w/ worst air quality 30 yrs ago have now improved.

So a possible inference would connect public outcries to the improvement in the worst cities' air quality.

Correct Answer:
E

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) We don't know anything about cities with the worst pollution TODAY, so there's no way to judge this comparison.

(B) Too strong: "NO city"? They ALL improved? We can't prove that from the provided info.

(C) Too specific: "more than 51% of the public outcry" can be localized to the #1 polluted city? We can't get that specific.

(D) Unknown Comparison. We can't judge whether the improved cities are still the worst or if they have climbed the ranking past other cities. Other cities may have also improved. We don't know.

(E) YES! And, as we anticipated, this makes use of the causal chain they provided us with.

Takeaway/Pattern: Our job isn't to predict the answer with Inference, because we are ultimately at the mercy of the answer choices. But we SHOULD read proactively for conditional/causal/quantitative wording and, when we see it, figure out whether it allows us to combine claims to derive something else.

#officialexplanation

[AlisaS425]

Hi Patrick,

I have a question. The stimulus said "this (improvement of air quality) wouldn't have happened without these stricter regulations", I thought it could be diagrammed as:

improvement of quality --> stricter regulations

And the first sentence said "public outcries brought about stricter regulations", which can be diagrammed as:

public outcries --> stricter regulations

If the above diagram is correct, then why is (E) inferable from the stimulus? Wouldn't it require us to reverse the logic of the last sentence? Only if we think of the last sentence as: "stricter regulations --> improvement of quality" can we justify (E), right?

I don't know if I overthink. I know (E) is the best answer choices as the others have clear flaws, but I just want to make sure if my thought process is right. Thanks.