PT67.S4.Q08 - if the burden of a proposed policy change

AnthonyScalia

Hello! I was hoping to get some clarification on this question.

So clearly our right answer should link the reintroduction of rock salt to a disproportionate burden on low income people.

I put B, and the correct answer is D.

My understanding is that you're supposed to use the part of the prompt that says "Although the city claims that cars are now better protected from salt's corrosive properties than they were as recently as five years ago" to pair with the text D, which says that low income people are more likely to purchase older vehicles.

My issue is that I think not a large leap, but a nonsensical leap to interpret the prompt portion as referring to new cars in comparison with old cars. The text merely says that "cars are now better protected from salt's corrosive properties." There's literally one subject in that sentence: cars. The sentence makes no distinction about different groups of cars within the general "cars" umbrella. The distinction, grammatically and logically speaking, is between how "cars" handle salt now, and how "cars" handled salt before.

Maybe "cars" better handle salt because of some trends in humidity levels. Heck, you could just as easily and fairly interpret the opposite of what you were meant to. Maybe the older a car is, the more resistant it becomes to salt corrosion because they develop a layer of dirt and debris that keeps the salt from penetrating as deeply as it does in new cars which are exposed.

Deriving the necessary assumption is ludicrous and arbitrary, in my view.

On the contrary, D requires but a small, feasible leap. We're told that sales tax disproportionately burdens low income people. We're told that road maintenance is primarily funded by local sales tax. This appears to have all the ingredients we need to make a perfectly in-tact chain of logic. All we have to do is check to see if rock salt re-introduction counts as road maintenance.

Rock salt is applied to roads in order to maintain a safe, drivable road. It is undoubtedly a road maintenance matter. We weren't using it for several years, we are now. Sure, maybe we have a vast reservoir of rock salt in an underground bunker that will spare us any additional expense, but that's terribly farfetched and extreme. At the very least you're going to have some costs associated with the switch, if not also the highly likely case that you're going to have to buy some quantity of rock salt, the money of which is coming from sales tax that disproportionately burdens low-income people.

B seems to be all but iron clad, while D is all but impossible. We need but the smallest, likeliest set of circumstances for B to work. We need the biggest, most ridiculous, most ambiguous crapshoot of an assumption in order for D to make a drop of sense.

Am I missing something here?

https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-67-section-4-question-08/

akistotle

https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-67-section-4-question-08/

This is a PSA question, and the key here is "policy change" in the principle.

[Principle]
・Burden of a proposed policy change would fall disproportionately on people with low incomes → Policy change should not be made

[Application]
P: The city of Centerburgh plans to reintroduce rock salt as a road de-icing agent
P: The city have stopped the use of rock salt several years ago because it accelerated the corrosion of automobiles.
[The city claims that cars are now better protected from salt’s corrosive properties than they were 5 years ago]
———
C: The city’s plan should be halted

(B) is incorrect because the principle is talking about a change in policy. If low-income people are already paying for road maintenance, then the policy change does not really "fall disproportionately on people with low incomes."

We need something that says that the reintroduction of rock salt as a road de-icing agent would fall disproportionately on people, and that is what (D) does.