Q17 - Consultant: The mayor shouldn't adopt her rival's cont

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Match the Reasoning

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: Mayor shouldn't adopt rival's proposal for solving budget problem.

Evidence: If she adopts it and it succeeds, the rival might get more credibility. If it fails, she will get blamed for wasting time on that bad idea.

Answer Anticipation:
This has the structure of:
You shouldn't do X.
If it works, something bad could happen.
If it doesn't work, something bad happens.

Correct Answer:
D

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Conclusion mismatch out of the gate. We want a conclusion that says "you SHOULDN'T". I would bail after the first sentence.

(B) I would bail once I start reading the second sentence. We need a pair of conditional premises that sound like, "If it works, it's bad. If it doesn't work, it's also bad."

(C) This does not have a pair of "if it works, it's bad. If it doesn't work, also bad" premises.

(D) YES, this seems like the best. You shouldn't do something. If it goes well, something bad could happen. If it goes poorly, something bad will happen.

(E) Conclusion mismatch again. This is saying we SHOULD do something.

Takeaway/Pattern: If we just looked for structural features like "CONC is a should-not claim" and "the two PREMs are both conditional", then we would land on (D). We would still want to verify the logical similarity overall, but using our cheap trick heuristics of bad CONC or PREM matches would be a useful tool for getting to (D) more efficiently.

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