Q7 - In Western economies, more energy

[sbuzzetto10]

I chose the correct answer (A) on this question, but could someone reiterate why D is incorrect? My mind's just blanking and I wanted to make sure I had a clear reason for eliminating D. Thanks!

[giladedelman]

Thanks for your post!

I'll be honest, I find answer (D) to be kind of a head-scratcher, too. So with the caveat that I'm not 100% sure why it's wrong, here are two issues that made me decide to eliminate it in favor of (A):

1) $200 billion is too specific. The conclusion says technology will save more than $200 billion per year. So it doesn't have to be true that at some point, energy bills will be exactly $200 billion lower.

2) Inflation. The argument says that technology will save over $200 billion in today's dollars. But answer (D) just says energy bills will be lower by that number. That's not adjusting for inflation, that is, that's not in today's dollars. Maybe there will actually be deflation, in which case bills could be lower only by $100 billion but still be saving $200 billion in today's dollars.

I'd appreciate anyone else's thoughts on this one!

By the way, just to walk through this quickly:

The premise tells us, in a nutshell, that energy-efficient technology is saving us billions right now. Then it concludes that 50 to 100 years from now, it will save us over $200 billion per year. Really a bizarre argument, assuming a whole bunch of things. It seems like the overall assumption is that this trend will continue. But we're looking for a necessary assumption, so we might not be able to predict it.

(A) is necessary because it does have to be true that this technology won't become prohibitively expensive. If it did, then we'd have to stop using it, so we wouldn't be saving any money.

(B) is out because we don't need an oil crisis. That's just the event that precipitated the current technology boom.

(C) is incorrect because the issue is, will we continue to increase our efficiency or not?

(E) is incorrect because we don't require new scientific principles, according to the argument.

Hope that helps!

[sbuzzetto10]

Yes, that helps! I also eliminated D because it seemed too specific to be necessary but wanted to make sure I was eliminating it for the right reason and wasn't overlooking something. Thanks!

[fyami001]

Hello
Would you consider the argument misleading in that it says " new building technologies...have cut billions of dollars" rather than say "current building technologies"?

I ask this because I got a little thrown off by answer choice E, due to the repetition of the word "new", which automically made me want to connect it to the premise. If this a trend in the LSAT, to repeat words from the argument in wrong answer choices, I should watch out for this,no?

[timmydoeslsat]

Hello
Would you consider the argument misleading in that it says " new building technologies...have cut billions of dollars" rather than say "current building technologies"?

I ask this because I got a little thrown off by answer choice E, due to the repetition of the word "new", which automically made me want to connect it to the premise. If this a trend in the LSAT, to repeat words from the argument in wrong answer choices, I should watch out for this,no?

Answer choice E carries a new topic with it in its use of the word new. It states that technologies based on new scientific principles will be introduced.

That is not a necessary assumption. If you negate this answer choice, it would state that the energy-efficient technologies based on new scientific principles will not be introduced.

And that is fine.

[fyami001]

Merci Boucoup! Looking back, I see I was rushing too much in trying to understand!

[geverett]

Interesting wrong answer choice - D. I eliminated it for reason #1 that you had Gilead. I think D would have been right at it said "at least $200 billion." I kept thinking that I would find something wrong with it in terms of the savings not necessarily being passed onto consumers, but that definitely was not the case. Prohibitively in answer choice A is definitely extreme enough for it to have to not be the case in order for the argument to hold water.

[christinenyoung]

I didn't like D because it seemed to reiterate the conclusion, but changed it enough to not make sense. Exactly instead of more and "lower" instead of "save."

Also, if this is the conclusion.. can the assumption be a (poor) restatement of the conclusion?

[guolan27]

I agree as well. Answer choice (D) is just a re-statement of the conclusion. It is explicitly stated (assumptions are unstated) and does not do anything to help strengthen the argument, which assumptions should do.

[griffin.811]

So I think answer choice D is incorrect for a reason not stated. D says that the energy bills will be $200 dollars less in the future.

Well, in reality we would probably expect the bills to be higher. The issue is the bills could be higher and still save money. For instance lets say the energy bills increase $10B over a time span, but without these technologies, the bills would have increased $210B. Aren't we still saving $200B? Sure.

I have an issue with A. I don't think its necessary. We know that more energy is used to operate buildings than is used for transportation, but what if we just reduced the energy bills of everything else instead? Cell phones, tablets, computers, video game consoles, transportation, etc...? I don't think its too big an assumption to think that the combination of all these things and those that I missed make up a fair amount of energy bill expenditures. What if the cost savings we could create here, outweigh the prohibitively expensive tech used on buildings?

I understand that I'm relying on an assumption, but A relies on the assumption that everything I just stated is false, which seems like a much bigger leap than the one I took.

Thanks for the help!

[richie18]

I'd like to give a fresh perspective on this question.

Previous State: Energy Use in buildings was high.

Since 1973: Energy consumption has decreased, with modifications in technology being a significant contributor, to the tune of several billion dollars per year.

Given this information, the author wishes to conclude that:

50-100 years from now, (they) will save 200 billion dollars (real time).

The key word in this conclusion is "they". They being: New building technologies. In this future time period, technological advancements are expected to yield essentially 100 times what they are currently yielding.

How do we make the leap?



A.) "Prohibitively" expensive. Yes. We at least have to assume that the current technologies we have won't become prohibitively expensive. I'm not sure exactly how we are going to make the jump from a couple billion in efficiency savings a year, to over 200 billion in savings, however, No affordable energy efficient technology = no savings.


B.) There is nothing that tells us that oil crises are the magic elixir for energy savings. We could have 2, 3, 4 oil crises during that period of time. Is that going to make us more energy efficient? Maybe...but no guarantee.

C.) I don't see how "importance" can play into our assumption. We are looking for something that protects the validity of 200 billion dollars savings figure, and I don't see it here.

D.) This is wrong because it doesn't tell us what portion of the 200 billion dollars is due to savings from "New Building technologies." Remember the key word in our conclusion is "they," which is referring to "technology"

E.) This is tough. I would like to assume that a "new energy efficient technology based on new scientific principles", would be one that was less costly then the ones currently available, but can we? If Richard Branson was out somewhere designing a wheat grass powered bio-mobile, he is doing something that is both new and energy efficient. That's not going to translate to savings in the West if he is going to charge us 5 million dollars a vehicle.

[WaltGrace1983]

Here are my thoughts:

Energy savings equals several billion dollars per year today
---->
In 50-100 years we will save more than $200 billion

Necessary Assumption
My Thought Process: This is basically saying, "we are saving so much money today and we have been saving more and more for many years. Since we have done so well up until this point, in many years from now we will save even MORE!" The big problem with this argument is that it is assuming that everything (at least as it pertains to energy, money, etc.) will stay about the same and we will continue to save money. What if eventually something happens and all of this great technology becomes ridiculously expensive? Since I am looking at a necessary assumption question, I am thinking to myself "ok what is absolutely necessary for this argument to work?" From there I will eliminate everything that can be negated while still keeping the argument intact.

(A) Yes! This is correct because if we say this is not true and that these new technologies WILL become "prohibitively" expensive then what will happen? The argument falls apart! We won't be saving anymore! We will probably be losing it and there is no way we are going to be saving $200 billion if they become "prohibitively" expensive. If I take this negation, assume its truth, and see the argument fall apart, then that answer choice is correct. This is exactly what I did here and (A) is the correct answer.

(B) This is not necessary at all. First of all, the oil crisis may not have actually CAUSED the more efficient use (though we assume so). Also, the years are way too specific. Would my argument fall apart if another oil crisis happened in 49 years? No. Would my argument fall apart if no oil crisis happened at all? No, not at all.

(C) This doesn’t really do anything to the argument either. Let’s say it does become less important, does that mean anything? Could we still be saving boatloads of money? Absolutely. If it still more important can we still save all of this money? Yes! Maybe even more so!

(D) I took this for conclusion redundancy. However, if you don't like that, $200 billion is an awfully specific number. What if the bills were $199 billion lower? Would that hurt the argument? No it really wouldn't.

(E) What if these new technologies are based on current scientific principles? Will this do anything to the argument? No. This is very specific - almost too specific for an NA question

[disguise_sky]

So I think answer choice D is incorrect for a reason not stated. D says that the energy bills will be $200 dollars less in the future.

Well, in reality we would probably expect the bills to be higher. The issue is the bills could be higher and still save money. For instance lets say the energy bills increase $10B over a time span, but without these technologies, the bills would have increased $210B. Aren't we still saving $200B? Sure.

I agree with you. The biggest issue with (D) is that it twists the meaning of the $200m sentence in the stimulus.

[George.kobakhidze61]

I got A by denial test. Keep in mind this is necessary assumption we are looking for. In terms of If/then, it means that our assumption would need to be true for the conclusion to be possible (to save 200 billion per year in future). Otherwise, if necessary assumption is not satisfied, the argument must fall apart. So... lets say technology that is used to make buildings energy efficient becomes PROHIBITIVELY expensive. It implies that buildings would not be able to afford the technology, which leads to no cuts in energy bills through use of new technology. Tadaaa and the entire argument falls apart.

You can apply on your own the denial test to other choices. You'll notice that denying none of the other options necessarily make the conclusion impossible.

Hope this helps...

[rezaul_nsu]

To beat the assumption question, negation technique is the best weapon.
After using it, we can tell Answer A is the correct answer since if energy saving equipments become more expensive later, people will use them less.
Option B is irrelevant.
Option C does hold if applying negation technique. If building becomes instead more energy driven, still saving even more than $200 B. so, after negation, it even strengthens rather than weaken the conclusion.
Option D is wrong because of some problems inherent. One is 'bill'. Another is saying $200 B lower but we need more than 200$ meaning $201 or more.
Option E is very tricky and attractive. But negation technique can eliminate it as well, since even if existing technology is enough for the validity of the conclusion. In fact, reading this passage might tempt us to think on new discovery of technologies to come in the future . But here, it is in fact suggested that more saving is possible in the future just because of the natural assumption that day by day new technologies become popular to people. If 40% people use energy saving equipments, in the future more and more people will be attracted to it..even jumped to 70 or 80%.
TY

[MJ]

There's one more thing that does not make sense to me, between A and E. I could use Negation Test to get A, but my question about E:

Now the technology allows for billion of dollars cut, but in 50-100 years, we are looking at 200 billion cut? How does the cut become so big? Is it because there's improvement and newer technology?

Am I overthinking it and out of scope?