@ you're welcome, glad to help

Hey tahur, I believe you got the reasoning right. For further clarification, the structure of the argument is:

i) Banks pay premiums for insurance on an individual's deposits.

ii) However, the individual is the beneficiary of this policy.

iii) Therefore, the individual should bear the cost for the insurance on their deposit.

ii) Therefore, the government should ensure that the individual bears the cost of insuring their deposit.

For the above arguement to follow, we would need to assume that the bank isn't already taking measures to collect the required premium amount from depositors. This would mean that the individual is indirectly bearing the cost of the insurance.

C simply gives us one manner in which the banks are already collecting premium amounts from depositors, and so it follows that it is an assumption.

(Perhaps another assumption that this argument could entail is that individuals must bear the costs for policies that benefit them , as the argument just presumes this to be axiomatic.)

Hey.

You are correct in saying that (E) requires the presumption of a return trip, but the reason I considered E to be more cogent and explanatory than D is for the following reason:

You rightly stated that it is possible that Phobos has a stationary orbit. If this were the case, two possibilities arise.

i)Phobos is closer to Earth than Mars.

ii) Phobos is farther from Earth than Mars.

If it does not however, we encounter more problems:

While it is true that if Phobos orbits around Mars, it must reach a point wherein it is closer to Earth than to Mars, this requires the additional presumption that we would launch in accordance with synchrony with this orbit.(ie that we would launch the flight when Phobos is closer to the Earth than Mars.)

Additionally, even we were to presume this, could this fuel be less than half of what would be required to go to Mars? This would require us to know the size of the orbit and how far away from Mars does Phobos orbit. It is unlikely that fuel expenditure would be less than half even in a practical scenario.

For the reasons above, I found (E) to be a much safer bet as it accounts for the amount of fuel used that matches the stimulus at hand. (To put it simply, it requires only one assumption, that there is a return trip.)

And considering the fact that it is a manned expedition, I do not think that this assumption is unreasonable.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Prem.

I'm interested!