No, it's descriptive. They're talking about what rap is, not what rap should be.

There is a strong causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer. Remember, causal logic is not formal logic--the premises can never guarantee the conclusion. But you can still evaluate causal arguments on a spectrum from weak to strong using the tools from the prior lessons.

Smoking causing lung cancer is actually quite a strong causal argument (see: chronology, causal mechanism...)

If we know that a majority of almonds are produced for domestic consumption and that most almonds require intense irrigation, we know that at least on almond produced for domestic consumption requires irrigation to produce. So, you could say that.

I'm not sure why they chose to go with "some foods." Maybe they wanted to make it as clear as possible that you can use this argument format to demonstrate a separate third point.

That is correct.

for 8.3:

[subject] → [predicate]

In the sentence "It is cruel to bully someone for their differences," "it" acts as a placeholder for "bully someone for their differences."

We can, therefore, translate the sentence as "Bullying someone for their differences is cruel," which, in lawgic, would look like "Bullying someone for their differences → cruel,"

That's definitely an aspect, but it is important not to evaluate an argument by how many premises support the conclusion.

Yes--J.Y. was definitely right to say that this works better as an MSS.

Answer choice C states that the city is spending too much on maintenance of bridges, whereas the author argues that the city is spending too little. I think that you may have been tripped up by the fact that the author later claims that the city has (as a result of spending too little on maintenance) had to spend more on reconstruction.