PrepTest 129, Section 3, Question 8
City council member: The Senior Guild has asked(73 more words not shown)
The city council member's argument(10 more words not shown)
- Adistorts an argument(6 more words not shown)
- Bdismisses a claim(10 more words not shown)
- Cpresumes, without sufficient(13 more words not shown)
- Dcontains premises that(3 more words not shown)
- Efails to make(9 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Why can't the council grant this deserving request and turn down the undeserving ones?
The council member acknowledges that the Senior Guild appears to deserve an exception to the ban on automobiles in parks. But the argument then predicts a chain of escalating concessions: this exception will lead to many others, some undeserved; those will lead to exceptions to other ordinances; eventually the city faces anarchy.
I can understand worrying about setting a precedent. What I don't see is why the council would lose the ability to judge future requests. It could approve this temporary exception for its particular reasons and refuse another request that lacks those reasons. The author needs to explain why that line cannot hold.
What we’re looking for
The flaw question should identify the unsupported chain of consequences. Calling it a domino effect does not establish that the dominoes will actually fall. The argument uses that prediction to reject a request it otherwise considers deserving.
Working the answers
- A
The council member does not misrepresent what the Senior Guild requests and then attack the distorted version. For example, the author does not pretend the Guild asked for every ordinance to be abolished. Instead, the author predicts that granting the actual request will eventually have much broader consequences. The unsupported prediction is the problem.
- B
The argument does not reject the request because of who made it. In fact, it acknowledges that this group's case appears to deserve an exception. The reason for denial is the predicted sequence of future events, not a criticism of the Senior Guild as a source.
- CCorrect
The council member assumes that granting this exception will set off the escalating series without adequately supporting those causal links. The council might continue distinguishing deserving requests from undeserving ones. We need evidence that this first decision would lead to the later decisions and ultimately the feared outcome.
- D
Contradictory premises would make claims that cannot both be true. A particular exception can be deserved while granting it has bad consequences, so those ideas are not inherently inconsistent. The problem is that the consequences have not been established, not that the premises contradict each other.
- E
The author explicitly distinguishes deserved and undeserved exceptions: this request appears deserved, while some future exceptions would be undeserved. The flaw concerns the assumption that the council will grant those future undeserved requests. Failing to justify that prediction is different from failing to recognize the distinction.
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