PrepTest 111, Section 3, Question 7
Opponent of offshore oil drilling: The projected benefits(91 more words not shown)
The drilling proponent's reply to(5 more words not shown)
- Aoffering evidence in(16 more words not shown)
- Bclaiming that the(11 more words not shown)
- Cpointing out that(14 more words not shown)
- Dciting as parallel(17 more words not shown)
- Eproposing a conclusion(19 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Half of one percent sounds small, but small compared with what? A country uses a great deal of oil. A small share of that total could still be useful.
The opponent also mentions the risk of environmental disaster without telling us how likely or severe that risk is. I'd want more information before deciding whether the added oil is worth it. A percentage describing the benefit doesn't, by itself, settle the comparison with the risk.
The proponent responds with farms. No single new farm could feed the whole country for long, but that doesn't seem like a good reason to forbid new farms. Many small contributions can add up to a country's food supply, just as many wells can contribute to its oil supply.
What we’re looking for
We're asked to describe the proponent's strategy. The response moves the opponent's reasoning into another setting where the conclusion looks unsupported: 'This addition supplies only a tiny share of the total, so we shouldn't allow it.' I'd look for an answer describing that parallel argument. We don't have to decide whether it completely settles the drilling dispute to recognize what the proponent is doing.
Working the answers
- A
The proponent doesn't provide new evidence about how much oil the wells would produce or how dangerous they would be. The response uses a comparison with farms to challenge the reasoning. A description of more decisive factual support for drilling misses that method.
- B
The proponent doesn't say the 4 percent or one-half-of-1-percent figures are wrong. The reply can accept those figures and still question what follows from a small contribution. It attacks the use of the numbers, not their accuracy.
- C
The response doesn't identify a usually legitimate reasoning method and explain why the opponent has misapplied it in this case. Instead, it offers a similar argument whose conclusion looks unreasonable. C adds an endorsement of the method in other circumstances that the proponent never gives.
- DCorrect
The farm argument is presented as a parallel: each new farm supplies only a small portion of national demand, just as the proposed wells supply only a small portion of national oil demand. Yet banning new farms for that reason would be poorly supported. The proponent uses that result to challenge the opponent's inference from a small contribution to rejecting the project.
- E
The proponent doesn't use the oil figures to derive a new, better-supported conclusion about drilling. The reply constructs a comparison in a different setting and invites us to see a problem in the reasoning. It is a challenge through a parallel example, not a replacement conclusion drawn from the same evidence.
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