PrepTest 147, Section 1, Question 2
A lack of trust in one's neighbors leads(39 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the argument(6 more words not shown)
- Atreats something that(16 more words not shown)
- Bdraws a moral(10 more words not shown)
- Cbases its conclusion(5 more words not shown)
- Dasserts in a(10 more words not shown)
- Etreats what could(14 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
What if people lock their doors because the neighborhood has a burglary problem?
What we’re looking for
The argument says distrusting your neighbors leads those neighbors to have less respect for the law. Its evidence is that neighborhoods where people routinely lock their doors have more burglaries. But which came first? If I know there have been lots of burglaries nearby, I have a good reason to distrust the people around me and lock my door. The crime could create the distrust, rather than the distrust creating the crime. That's the flaw I'd predict. The study shows locked doors and burglaries occurring together. It doesn't establish the direction of the proposed cause and effect.
Working the answers
- A
The argument isn't taking something that guarantees a result and claiming that the result requires it. It doesn't say distrust is the only possible route to lawlessness, for example. The problem comes earlier: the evidence hasn't established that distrust causes the lawlessness in the first place.
- B
Mentioning respect for the law doesn't make this a moral recommendation. The author is trying to explain why people behave a certain way, not concluding that we ought to trust our neighbors or that locking doors is morally wrong. So there is no jump from facts to a moral conclusion here.
- C
These facts can both be true: people lock their doors, and burglaries are common. Nothing in one fact contradicts the other. The problem is what the author thinks those facts prove about why the burglaries occur.
- D
The evidence doesn't already assert the conclusion. Saying that locked doors and high burglary rates occur in the same neighborhoods is different from saying that distrust causes people to break the law. That difference is exactly why we can accept the study's result while questioning the argument's explanation.
- ECorrect
The author treats distrust as the cause of lawlessness without considering that it could be an effect of lawlessness. Frequent burglaries could make residents distrust their neighbors and lock up. That would produce the study's pattern even if distrust weren't causing the burglaries at all. We don't have to prove this is what happened; its being a reasonable alternative shows why the study doesn't establish the author's explanation.
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