Q26 - Decreased reliance on fossil fuels is required

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Match the Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: Ending global warming requires $ incentives for alternate energy.
Evidence: Ending global warming requires decreased reliance on fossil fuels. And if we offered $ incentives for alternate energy, then we would have decreased reliance.

Answer Anticipation:
If we're doing a Flaw question and we see Conditional Logic, 9 times out of 10 it's some Conditional Logic flaw! Indeed it is here. The author gives us,
P1: A ---requires--> B
P2: If we did C, we would get B.
Thus: A ---requires--> C

We should be thinking, conversationally, "giving $ incentives to alt. energy sources is identified as ONE POSSIBLE way. Why is the author concluding we MUST do that? Maybe there are other ways to decrease the reliance on fossil fuels."
Correct Answer:
D

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) This is a valid argument.

(B) This has a reversal, but it's not a great match. Here, the two premises chain together and give us "Ex --> GH --> HL" and then the conclusion reads that backwards. In the original, the two premises did not chain together.

(C) This is a valid argument.

(D) YES! Improving education --requires--> keeping good teachers. If we paid them more, we'd keep them. Thus, the author concludes, Improving education --requires--> we pay them more.

(E) (E) is like (B). The premises chain together, and the conclusion reads the chain backwards.

Takeaway/Pattern: Being comfortable with diagramming the "formula" of the original can make eliminating (B) and (E) much easier / more confident. Understanding valid logic would allow us to kill (A) and (C).

#officialexplanation

[SarahA11]

I don't usually do these questions this way but I always struggle with finishing them quickly and would like to know if the way I approached this problem is a viable option...

So I broke down the argument as
A (if global warming halted) --> B (decreased reliance on fossil fuels)
C (economic incentives to develop alternative energy) --> B (decreased reliance on fossil fuels)
A (if global warming halted) --> C (economic incentives to develop alternative energy)

and then when I moved to the answer choices, I exclusively looked at whether the concluding conditional/conclusion featured A as the sufficient condition and if it didn't then I eliminated and moved on.

So for answer choice A:
the first conditional was A (end poverty) --> B (end hunger)
and the conclusion started with ending employment instead of A (ending poverty) so I eliminated it

answer choice B:
first conditional is A (daily exercise) --> B (good health)
and the conclusion started with B (good health) so eliminate.

answer choice C:
the first conditional and the conclusion both start with A (getting a professional job) as the sufficient condition so keep it.

answer choice D:
the first conditional and the conclusion both start with A (getting a professional job) as the sufficient condition so keep it.

answer choice E:
first conditional is A (preventing abuse of RX drugs) --> B (expanding drug education efforts)
and conclusion starts with if cooperation increases so I eliminated it.

Basically I guess I'm wondering if it saves time to eliminate answer choices based on only one part of matching the original argument (in this case the 1st statement and the conclusion) and then evaluate the remaining answer choices more in depth? In your explanation you said that A was valid and that was how you eliminated it but I usually struggle with seeing that the argument is valid right away without thinking about it for a while. I'm just not sure how to speed up on these questions without losing accuracy so I'm additionally wondering whether I could potentially miss something or get the answer wrong if I do it this way or if you have a better way to do it??

[ohthatpatrick]

The only problem with that approach is that the flaw isn't really specific to which one comes first.

You could have an argument that says.
A --> B
C --> B
thus, C --> A

That would be the same flaw. So your approach on this one might be a tad too stringent (also, Matching questions, in order to disguise the correct answer, sometimes mix up the order of ingredients in a way where the argument is the same but we wouldn't immediately see it's the same (the ideas come in different sequence, so it doesn't have the same rhythm).

I would suggest that you think to yourself,
"I need two conditional premises that both end at the same idea (B).
And I need a conclusion that makes a conditional statement out of the two triggers".

If the correct answer had been written in the style of
C --> B
A --> B
Thus, A --> C

It would still be the same flaw. But your method there would have not noticed it was the same.

So you're very close to a very usable shortcut. It just so happens that on THIS problem, the flaw is the same whether the conclusion goes from
A --> C or from C --> A,
so the idea that the FIRST TRIGGER we see in an answer choice must be the TRIGGER IN THE CONCLUSION is overly restrictive.

Luckily, here it didn't matter. Nice work.