Q3 - Enrique: The city's transit authority does not have

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
ID the Disagreement

Stimulus Breakdown:
E: The CTA is about to run out of money. Rather than increasing fares or decreasing services, they should keep going until they run out of money, at which point the fed govt will bail them out.
C: The govt would probably just let them go out of business, rather than bail them out. The CTA can't risk that.

Answer Anticipation:
The disagreement is pretty stark here:
E is suggesting a maneuver that C thinks is a bad idea. So they disagree on whether the CTA should "maintaining fares/services, running out of money, and counting on a federal bailout".

The reason they disagree is itself a disagreement. E thinks the feds WOULD bail out the CTA, and C thinks it's unlikely the feds would bail out.

(That strength of language is key, though. E thinks a bailout is CERTAIN. C thinks that a bailout is POSSIBLE BUT UNLIKELY)

Correct Answer:
A

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Possibly! (and ultimately YES) This sounds like the overall "maneuver" that E is endorsing and C is rejecting.

(B) Neither person discusses whether the feds SHOULD bail out; there is only talk of whether the feds WOULD bail out.

(C) Neither person is discussing the alternative world, in which they DO cut services and/or raise fares.

(D) Neither person discusses the feds' CURRENT willingness to give money. They are only talking about in the hypothetical scenario in which the CTA has completely run out of money.

(E) E would disagree with this, and C has no comment.

Takeaway/Pattern: There was more than one disagreement in this stimulus. They disagreed on whether or not to do the PLAN, and they disagreed on a whether a certain PREDICTION would come true (that the PLAN was counting on). The correct answer ended up being about "whether or not to do the PLAN", but it could have just as easily been "whether the federal government would be likely to let the CTA go out of business, were the CTA to run out of money".

#officialexplanation