LR Drill Set 12, Question 5
A government should not try to suppress the(42 more words not shown)
Which one of the following(11 more words not shown)
- AFarmers should not(31 more words not shown)
- BA government should(32 more words not shown)
- COne should not(42 more words not shown)
- DUnpopular authors should(36 more words not shown)
- EOne should not(38 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Banning the book might be the best advertisement it ever gets.
The government's goal is to suppress the book's ideas. But the argument says that news of the ban will make people curious, and that curiosity will increase the book's circulation. The ban would push the result in the opposite direction from the one the government wants.
Notice the reason for the recommendation. This isn't an argument about a right to free speech. Even if we put that issue aside, the author says the government shouldn't use this method because it defeats its own purpose. The book will circulate more than it would have without the ban.
What we’re looking for
For the parallel, predict an attempted solution that makes the very problem it targets worse. A bad side effect isn't enough. Neither is a method that leaves things unchanged. We need the same goal, attempted fix, and reversal of the intended result.
Working the answers
- A
The goal is a larger crop yield. The objection concerns consumers becoming ill from chemicals. That is a different bad outcome, not a reduction in the yield the farmers were trying to increase. To match the book argument, we'd need the pesticides to leave farmers with less produce than they otherwise would have had.
- B
This is close because it concerns a policy failing to reduce the problem it targets. But congestion remains as bad as before. The original goes further: banning the book increases its circulation. A traffic rule that induced even more people to drive might match that reversal; a rule people simply ignore does not.
- C
The proposed method doesn't supply the experience needed to learn cooking skills. That makes it an ineffective method, but the answer doesn't say watching the shows makes someone a worse cook. Failing to teach a skill isn't the same as actively moving the learner farther from the goal.
- D
An author can't reliably predict what the public will want by publication time. That makes the strategy uncertain. It doesn't establish that changing styles will reduce sales below what they otherwise would have been. Unpredictability is a different reason for rejecting a plan than a predictable reversal of its intended effect.
- ECorrect
The person wants fewer rodents, just as the government wants less circulation of the book. Using pesticides is the attempted fix; banning the book is the original fix. The pesticide use produces resistant rodents, just as news of the ban produces curiosity. Each process then leads to more of what the person wanted to reduce.
The recommendation has the same basis: don't use this method to solve the problem, because its consequences will make that problem worse. The subject matter has changed, but the reasoning has not.
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