PT1.S3.Q18 - In the United States proven oil reserves...

marsbars

Doesn't answer E attack the premise? Since in the passage it says that extractable known field remains the same and answer choice E says the lands that are unextractable are considered extractable now.

canihazJD

Same level doesn't mean exact same oil fields. The six pack in my fridge isn't the same six I had in there last week, but it's still six beers.

BinghamtonDave

RRE questions are my favorite questions on the LSAT. Before we get into this one we should state that the question is decades old, from PT 1. Some older questions might have a slightly different "feel" to them. With that being said, our first goal on RRE questions is to get absolutely certain what needs explaining, what the "paradox" actually is.

Here, what needs explaining/a resolution are the following facts existing at the same time:
The amount of oil considered get-able is the same now as it was in 2011, within this particular area. Let's call this 100,000 barrels.

Ok, pause there. Try this: what could explain this fact by itself, ie this seemingly unchanging amount of oil over this time period? 1. could be that people within this area completely stopped using/consuming the oil: an untouched resource remaining mostly the same.
2. It could be that the people in this area discovered or reached all new amounts of the resource and consumed at a rate that depleted just enough to stay even.

Now take a look at the second half of the problem here, they disqualify those two possible explanations, they cut them off from being the explanation. The second half of our problem tells us that although The amount of oil considered get-able is the same now as it was in 2011, within this particular area: 100,000 barrels yet (important word to pay attention to here) no new oil fields have been discovered: disqualifying explanation 2 above and people didn't stop using the oil, they actually increased usage! disqualifying explanation 1 above.

Let's think of a parallel situation for this problem: I have $100 in my bank account today and had $100 in my bank account on June 16, 2011 and yet I didn't stop using the account and my spending has actually increased!

So the question is written in a way that there could be what I call small solutions to the paradox here, I want to set those aside because they aren't super helpful in our analysis right now.

So one question I asked myself that gets to the core of your inquiry here is that AS READ there is certainly a situation that needs resolution here, but how sure are we that the two ends of this problem are indeed the case? Isn't it possible that we essentially miscounted the first part of our "paradox"? What if we undercounted the 100,000 reserve? What if I miscounted the initial $100 above? The whole issue here is that after increased usage and no "refilling" of the reserves we still have the same amount available.

This is what (E) essentially says: that the reserves were deeper than we thought, that they really contained 150,000 barrels initially but we thought 100,000 barrels and we didn't add to the total and we increased our consumption and now we have 100,000 total barrels. Here we see the qualifiers "extractable" and "unextractable" being used (probably to distract us- lol) but the idea is an undercounting one. That they contained more than we counted initially in 2011. Now, to your question about whether or not this "negates" the premise, I'm not sure. It is an additional piece of information that certainly allows us to reinterpret the premise in such a way that the initial tension fades away a bit. In our bank example this is saying something like: in 2011 I possessed savings bonds that hadn't matured yet, now they have and I continued to spend now I have the same amount of money I had previously.

This problem roughly fits into a set of answers that says essentially: there is no paradox.

jknarf513

I think it might be easier to argue that AC E attacks the premise if it said, "the extractable oil amount was incorrect" and just straight up sort of said to the premise, "nope". Instead, AC E gives us way more detail. It tells us that when we measured the extractable oil 10 years ago, our measurement was correct by the standard at the time. But now, we know more than we did 10 years ago due to technological advances. 10 years ago, we didn't know how to extract certain kinds of oil, so it was considered "unextractable." But now, we can get that oil that is buried super deep down into the same oil reserve, so we have more extractable oil than we did ten years ago because our knowledge has grown.
Maybe this example is easier to follow (though it isn't a perfect analogy): say in 1990 there was a disease that was considered incurable but in 2000 it was considered curable. The fact that now that disease is curable isn't a contradiction of the fact that we couldn't cure it 10 years ago; our information changed in those 10 years.
Hope that helps.

riverLethe

The only way this question finally clicked for me is the word 'reserves'. The amount that we are reserving, i.e. leaving in the ground, has remained the same. But we are consuming more. (E) says that we are now capable of extracting more. So, we can still keep the same amount in reserves and extract more.