Q16 - The tax bill passed 2 years ago provides substantial

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Necessary Assumption

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: The tax bill has created many jobs.
Evidence: The bill provides incentives for businesses who move and hire 50+ employees. Last year, Plastonica qualified for incentives by opening a new factory with 75 employees.

Answer Anticipation:
One missing idea seems to be establishing that Plastonica "moved to this area". Qualifying for incentives involved two things:
1. move to area 2. Hire 50+ employees

Other than that, this argument is a classic Causal Explanation.
The author takes an interesting fact (P opened a new factory with 75 employees) and assigns a causal interpretation to it (they did this, in part, BECAUSE of the new tax bill).

The author has to assume that there isn't some OTHER way to explain this state of affairs. The author has to assume that without the tax incentives, P wouldn't have opened that factory here or hired as many people

Correct Answer:
B

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) This is an extreme assumption, since it's conditional. We should check whether it matches the core, and it doesn't, because the core never discussed whehter P would have considered a factory in other areas.

(B) Yes, probably! The author is giving the tax bill credit for creating jobs by using the example of P's new factory. If P would have opened the factory either way, then that would weaken the author's argument.

(C) "Most" = too specific. The author's argument couldn't possibly be affected by whether 49% vs. 51% of critics claim a certain thing.

(D) Similar to (A), although this sounds more appealing. Someone who believes what (D) says is more inclined to think, "Wow, if P decided on our area over other areas, it must have been the tax bill". But this idea is not necessary. If you negate (D) and say that "P was either going to build in our area or not at all", that doesn't weaken the argument. The author could still claim that the tax bill created jobs, because without the tax incentives, the factory wouldn't have been built at all. "Whether P would have opened a factory elsewhere" is out of scope.

(E) The author doesn't have to assume anything about critics.

Takeaway/Pattern: Any time an author would argue, "X clearly brought about Y. After all, look at this example where Y happened." the author is assuming that "in that example, X is actually the thing that caused Y (not something else)"

#officialexplanation

[Jaime LeighB220]

Could you explain how you negated D to get "P was either going to build in our area or not at all"? I understand this is a necessary assumption question so negating answer choices help to narrow it down, but wasn't sure how you negated answer choice D.

I thought D was wrong because it didn't mention the incentive program at all, is that correct?

Thanks!

[ohthatpatrick]

Sorry about the delay, and sorry for my sloppy negation in explaining (D).

When you negate anything, you're just trying to find the minimal way of contradicting it.

NEGATING "I never drink and drive" is NOT "I always drink and drive", because even though that contradicted the original statement, it wasn't the minimal way.

NEGATING "I never drink and drive" should be "I have drank and driven at least once".

When you negate conditionals, it's tricky: people often think that when you negate a conditional, you get a new conditional, but this is incorrect.

Given this conditional, "If you're a girl, then you like Justin Bieber", the minimal way of contradicting it is "There is at least one girl who does not like Justin Bieber".

Any time we argue with a conditional, we are trying to argue
"It's possible to BE THE LEFT side idea, but NOT BE THE RIGHT side idea".

So the actual negation of (D) is
"It's possible that Plastonica would have not opened the plastics in the area, and would NOT have opened it somewhere else."

That possibility would be a world where Plastonica was thinking "either we open it in this area or we just don't open it".

But even if Plastonica had that attitude, it wouldn't weaken the argument. So (D) must not be a necessary assumption.

Another way to say this would be that (D), as written, is guaranteeing that Plastonica was going to open a factory. According to (D), it was either going to be opened in this area or somewhere else. And we could say this is more extreme than anything the author had to assume. She didn't need to assume that "Plastonica was definitely going to open a plant."

I think the reason you got rid of it is sound, although it's mainly because you had a strong sense of what was missing, so you knew this answer wasn't giving you what you wanted.

The only thing dangerous with this type of thinking is the inherent notion that anything HAD to be in the correct answer. For Sufficient Assumption, we're allowed to speak that way since we know our job is to derive the conclusion, which will sometimes REQUIRE certain ideas be in our correct answer to work.

But Necessary Assumption is a little more unpredictable, so while you should definitely proactively seek out any assumptions you anticipated, you would still potentially consider any answer (especially if you didn't find the idea you were looking for).

Hope this helps.