When I read the first sentence of the stimulus for the first time, because of the use of "by" I immediately thought that it might be a causal statement (was thinking that nutrient-rich sewage caused pollution of the estuaries). Now I can see that that's incorrect, but considering the time constraints, is there a simple way to make sure what you're reading is clearly a causal relationship or just a fact/statement? Do I just have to envision two things as phenomena in which the target phenomenon (effect) has definitely already happened as a result of the cause? Although I doubt this considering sometimes the language in the stimulus implies one phenomenon (cause) can only potentially cause the target one (effect). Any clarification would be great!

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Under the paragraph for Hypothesis 3, it mentions that the final reason why it is wrong is because it changed the target phenomenon. However, I thought that the target phenomenon would be "lung cancer" and "smoking" would be the causal phenomenon. I then assumed the causal mechanism would be a statement that explains exactly how smoking leads to lung cancer. Can someone clarify why the entire statement "smoking is correlated with lung cancer" is the target phenomenon instead? Is this because the original statement mentions that the two are correlated and doesn't explicitly state smoking to be a cause of lung cancer? I think I'm just overall still confused about what exactly constitutes a phenomenon, hypothesis, and explanation. Also, is correlation then just a statement that basically states an observation of two things, and that's why the whole sentence "smoking is correlated with lung cancer" acts as a target phenomenon?

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I have a question regarding the all arrows. If A --> B and A --> C lead to B some C because the all arrows can be converted into most arrows (aka the valid form: Two Split Mosts), is there any conclusion we can draw from having two statements such as B --> A and C --> A? In other words, when it's no longer the same sufficient term with two necessary terms but instead two different sufficient terms with the same necessary term. Would we just combine the two statements so that it becomes B + C --> A?

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Why is “or…but not both” also a biconditional indicator? I thought it would fall under the group 4 idea of negating the necessary condition (aka the “not both” indicator)?

Can someone explain the difference in the relationship between the premise and conclusion and a causal relationship? I believe the former is concerned with support and the latter requires an event to be the cause of another but the last 2 examples are confusing me a bit. Especially because the word “because” seems to be able to be used in 3 contexts: as a premise indicator, as a word introducing an explanation, and perhaps to introduce a cause in a causal relationship?