Starting off with the passage it can be summed by saying those that, those who dont pay for their own electricity don't have a reason to conserve energy therefore if we give them a reason by adding meters we will conserve energy. The shift in focus I think will help because we want to focus on how the actions of the landlord will lead to the effects they want. What A is doing is literally attacking the premise its saying that "Well actually tenants do have a financial incentive" which is not a fair way (LSAT wise) to attack the argument, we must attack the support structure. Here is a similar one: I have no reason to exercise, X wants to exercise so they will put a monitor on me and make me pay money if I don't, therefore I will exercise. We can talk about how exercising is actually good for me and that there is reason for me to exercise but thats not the focus. Hopefully thats a little bit cleared. As for the correct answer it points that an alternative solution, tenants who don't pay for their own electricity have lower energy consumption because their landlords have energy conserving appliances, and if we switch to the meters we don't know for certain if they what will happen to this current practice that already saves energy. Will it increase energy consumption? Will it lower? We don't know and just creating that level of doubt is enough to weaken the question.

Passing on some information, hopefully you find it useful:

The skeletal structure of this argument is a very familiar one. The flaw thats being is actually the older trick in the book which is confusing sufficiency for necessary. That aside let's take a look under the hood.

We have "superheated plasma in which electrical resistance fails" and that will be X

Next we have X that causes "ball lightning" and will now be Y

Lastly, under the assumption that this is the case, which we have to assume it is to go forward, Y must necessarily emit intense light and the plasma would rise. (That part is rephrased but we can call the emitting and rising Z)

Now we have a chain that looks like this: X-->Y-->Z. From here on just look back up because it will be just the variables

Good so far, now the professor is stating that during the occurrence of Y it has lead us to Z .

His conclusion is that of X--> Y. How can this be? Well the assumption (in arguments in general as well) is that there can be no contradiction and he sees one present. So if he sees one, where is it? It has to be X-->Z and X-->Z. The first part is given, the second part has to be inferred. How can X--> Z occur? The only way is that X-->Y-->Z. This means that X and Y must share a bi-conditional relation for it to be attached in such a way. Which is what E says. Lastly the creation of a contradiction just to solve the question is a round about way of doing this but the contradiction is heavily implied in this light so it was worth addressing.

I hope that was presented in a very clear manner and of some use.

Was stuck on this for a while and tried to understand B. If it helps you can think of the conclusion as C → VS. (If Not same culture then not values shared) what be is doing is C→VS (which is if Same Culture then Values Share possibly. It doesn't weaken because it's completely irrelevant to the conditional logic and has its own embedded conditionality of something in the future. We aren't in the future and we don't know what's going to happen then so who knows and more importantly who cares.

The short rewording of A is:

Because saving accounts did not increase (expected consequence), we can conclude there was no decrease in spending (supposed development).

Tough time understanding why this works but I think this is based on how hypothesis' function instead of what it does to support structure per say. D states the two studies in which no correlation was found, it was insufficient to draw any conclusion. So whats happening in our world "If there is a correlation between nearsightedness then it goes away with age", right now we have no evidence to the contrary.

Now given D, we have two studies that do not support any conclusion whatsoever, when we concluded that there is no correlation from our study we ruled out every other possible explanation. Specifically, we ruled out the possibility that nearsightedness does not go away with age. What is happening with D is that now, we just allow this possibility to exist, a possibility that if allowed will lead to an absurdity. While D does not weaken the support structure directly, much like the existence of an alternative conclusion, it does so in a round about way.