PrepTest 118, Section 2, Question 26

Working the answers

• A

  Contravened means violated or conflicted with. The text doesn't say the constitutional language expressly guaranteed ownership in the full modern sense. Whether the general protection reaches that far is the interpretive dispute, so A claims a direct contradiction we haven't established.

• B

  The hopeful reference to the Supreme Court fits. The reason doesn't: provincial courts are assigned the interpretive task and have just ruled on property rights. Disliking their ruling doesn't mean they lacked authority to make it.

• C

  This confuses establishing a right with interpreting its scope. The third paragraph asks what ownership amounts to even when it is fully established. More evidence of early occupation wouldn't by itself resolve whether that ownership includes selling the land.

• D

  We aren't told that politicians or other interests pressured the court. Conservative describes the restrictive ruling here; it doesn't establish a political cause.

• E
  Correct

  The court applied the reforms to what it understood as an existing right to use land. The writer calls its assessment of the current law “excessively conservative.” E captures that distinction: it recognized the protective purpose but interpreted the existing right too narrowly when deciding what protection would provide.