PT30.S2.Q20 - justified public funding

Samcandoit!

http://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-30-section-2-question-20/
Hello guys, this MBT question actually comes from the MBT course video. Most people have the question about the last sentence "even its critics acknowledge." I have read all the replies in order to understand why there is tremendous public support, but I still don't understand. When JY explains this sentence, he dropped a period before "for the project", I don't know whether he indicated that "for the project" is not a modifier of "would be not tremendous public support", but rather of "even its critics acknowledge". Could someone kindly explain this? The grammar here is really hard.

c.janson35

The key to this question is really the last sentence, and it is important that we understand exactly what it is saying. "If the critics were right about this," (this referring to their idea of what must be true for the project to be justified), "then there would not be the tremendous amount of public support that even its critics acknowledge." The fact that the critics are acknowledging the existence of public support means that there is in fact tremendous public support. It exists and we are certain about it from the ending of the last sentence.

Now, if we diagrammed the last sentence up until the "that even its critics..." It would look something like this:

CR-->/PS

That is, "if the critics are right, then there would not be public support"

Taking the contrapositive of this gives us

"PS-->/CR"

And we are in luck! Because the stimulus told us that there is in fact public support! So it must be true that the critics are not right in their idea about what must be true for a project to be justified. They initially said that a project is justified only if benefits could be shown, so if we now know this is incorrect, it must be true that a project can be justified even if there is no public benefit shown, which is what E tells us!


Hope this helps! If you are still unsure about the grammar lemme know!

Samcandoit!

@c.janson35 I am still confused by the grammar. How do you know that the critics acknowledge that there is "public support" instead of "no public support"?

c.janson35

Well if the critics are acknowledging something, then they are "admitting something to be true." The way the sentence is written is to imply that the critics are conceding the fact that there is tremendous public support. They are against public funding but are nonetheless acknowledging that there is public support for the project.

If there were no public support then the critics wouldn't be "acknowledging" this fact, they would be using it as evidence that they are correct! But they have no choice but o acknowledge the support even though it goes against what they believe.

Another way of reading this is by just adding "there is" to the end of the last sentence. And if you read the stimulus as a whole rather than just parsing individual words, the author is implicitly arguing against the critics position. That's the way their argument is structured.

Finally, what is the verb acknowledging referring to? The word "the" preceding public support indicates that it is in fact public support it is referring to. There is nothing in the argument that says "no public support"; the argument says "then there would not be THE public support THAT even its critics acknowledge." The word "even" is indicative here also... It is being used as an adverb to emphasize the occurrence of the fact that critics are acknowledging that support exists. Why are they using even? Because the critics have all the reason to ignore the support or act like it doesn't exist, yet EVEN THEY are acknowledging (i.e. conceding the fact) that it exists.

Samcandoit!

Thank you. Perfectly explains this sentence.

c.janson35

Awesome, glad I could help!

goalis180

This question is brutal. The whole thing literally relied on the statement "even its critics acknowledge."

goalis180

@c.janson35 how many of these types of question does a test average?

c.janson35

@goalis180 not really sure how to answer your question because I don't know necessarily what "type" of question you are referring to here.

goalis180

Dw about it @c.janson35 I meant how many Level 5 difficulty MBT, but I asked that question because I was frustrated as hell yesterday with the difficult mbt questions.