I actually think you identified the conclusion correctly. Your mistake did not come down to the conclusion identification. Here is how I did this question correctly despite identifying the second sentence as the major conclusion:
Major conclusion: These emergencies could be avoided if Springhill would introduce permanent economic incentives for water conservation.
Minor conclusion: Springhill discourages conservation.
Minor premise: each household pays a modest monthly flat fee for any amount of water below a certain usage threshold. and a substantial per-litre rate only after the threshold is reached.
Answer Choice A: Out of Scope. The support between the major conclusion and the major premise has nothing to do with the enforcement of water emergency laws. We are concerned about whether water conservation can be encouraged without emergency laws.
Answer Choice B: This does the reverse of what we want. If anything, their refusal to make the threshold higher should make it looks like they are making some effort to encourage water conservation.
Answer Choice C: This is correct. This strengthens the conclusion by strengthening the support between the minor conclusion and minor premise. It has now become clear that the threshold is a discouragement because it is too high for essential usage.
Answer Choice D: This is incorrect because it does the reverse of Answer Choice C.
Answer Choice E: Who cares if the threshold will remain in place with or without the council's approval? Does this conditional statement make the threshold change harder? Not exactly because we don't know how hard it is to get council approval. Even if we assume that the threshold is unchangeable at the moment, it still does nothing to the argument because we still have no idea if the threshold is low enough for conservation encouragement or not.
I also identified the second sentence as the conclusion. With "therefore test", it is actually clear that the second sentence flows from the sentence after it (despite the invalid supporting logic between them). In addition, I just found out that answer choice A would have passed as a rare correct answer that strengthens the conclusion successfully if the conclusion had been "Springhill discourages conservation" which does not limit the scope within the discouragement when the emergency laws are not in place.
What the town authorities do with the emergency laws is out of scope here. I disagree with the argument analysis by JY. I think the conclusion of the argument is: These emergencies could be avoided if Springhill would introduce permanent economic incentives for water conservation. And I think "Springhill discourages conservation" is only a sub-conclusion. To strengthen the relationship between the conclusion and the major premise ("Springhill discourages conservation because of the threshold", which is essentially assuming an illegal negation of the conclusion but we won't get into that), we should only focus on providing more evidence showing that the authorities are doing poorly when it comes to encouraging water conservation when the emergency laws are not declared.
#help
I chose A based on the first sentence of it. I chose it because the fact that crocuses do not bloom for more than a few weeks each year makes the observation of crocuses with unopened blossoms an unreliable indicator of the temperature being below 2-degree celsius. Do we need to operate under the assumption that during the times when crocuses do not bloom they also don't produce mature but unopened blossoms?
#help
In the video, JY said B, if negated, would go against the argument. However, I have noticed another assumption in the argument: A computer can be as good as a human expert only if they imitate the way human experts store information. It seems to me that C is necessary only if this is assumed since computers can still be worse than human experts if what they require to achieve the same level of expertise is totally different. Are we supposed to test if an assumption is necessary with another assumption on mind? Is there anyone who can clear it up for me?
When it comes to necessary/sufficient assumption questions, I used to intuitively get to the right answer. As I am now forcing myself to apply consistent process, I am a bit confused as to how the rules apply. I understand that as a rule of thumb, question stems that feature 'depend on' require necessary assumptions, and those featuring 'properly drawn' require sufficient assumptions. I just wonder where do sufficient-and-necessary assumptions belong? #help#
We don't know anything about most lecturers who are good communicators. We only know every effective teacher is a good communicator, i.e., some good communicators are effective teachers. It could also be true that most lecturers who are good communicators are not effective teachers at all.