The lawyer concludes that it was not wrong for Meyers to take the compost. She supports this by saying that if you take something that you have good reason to think is someone else’s property, then you are stealing, and stealing is wrong. But Meyers did not have good reason to think that the compost was someone else’s property.

This is the cookie-cutter flaw of confusing necessary and sufficient conditions. The lawyer treats “good reason” as necessary for “wrong,” but according to her premises “good reason” is merely sufficient. So negating “good reason” tell us nothing about “wrong.”
In other words, even though Meyers had no good reason to believe that the compost was someone else’s property, it might still have been wrong to take it. Having “good reason” is not necessary for making something stealing or for making something wrong.

Between 1840 and 1860, why did the family fail to enjoy an increase in prosperity that corresponded to their increase in wool-income, which derived from the family’s increase in amount of wool sold internationally?

The correct answer should tell us about something that changed over 1840 to 1860 that might have led the family to either make less money or have greater expenses.

The stimulus can be diagrammed as follows:

If it is acceptable to intentionally misrepresent one’s beliefs, then you must be doing so in their interest.

The mayor claims that the city’s planned chemical plant cannot cause health problems because some of the protestors who oppose it were paid by developers with different reasons for opposing the plant.

This is an ad hominem argument because the mayor attacks the motives of the opposing side rather than engaging with the substance of the contested issue. The mayor fails to provide evidence that the plant cannot cause health problems, leaving the conclusion entirely unsupported. The motives of the protestors or their benefactors are entirely irrelevant to whether the factory is dangerous or not.

The stimulus can be diagrammed as follows:

If a motor is sound-insulated, it can be used in institutional settings.
No motors manufactured by EM Industries are sound-insulated.
Some motors that can be used in institutional settings are not manufactured by EM Industries.

The author concludes that animal food should not contain genetically modified plants. He supports this by citing a study where rats fed genetically modified potatoes for 30 days developed intestinal issues and a weakened immune system, while rats fed a normal diet of non-genetically modified food did not have these problems.

The author assumes that the study was representative and that the results observed in lab rats can be applied to all animals. Similarly, he assumes that the study on genetically modified potatoes can be generalized to all genetically modified plants, without considering differences between plant types.

He also assumes that the problems in the rats were caused solely by the genetic modification of the potatoes, without considering other factors or variables between the groups that could have influenced the results.

Robert Gillette’s argument isn’t convincing because he doesn’t consider that decoding the human genetic code might harm people more than it helps them.

The conclusion is the ethicist’s disagreement with Robert Gillette’s hypothesis that deciphering the human genetic code would benefit humanity. The ethicist ultimately concludes that Gillette’s argument is “not persuasive.”

A recent study explores the connection between hypnosis and increased power of recall. The subjects of the study listened to a long, unfamiliar piece of music. After subsequent hypnosis, half of the subjects were asked to recall passages from the musical piece and the other half were asked to describe scenes from a film “they had just viewed” but have in fact not seen. The study found the group that recalled the film were equally confident and detailed in their recollections as the other group in their music recollections.

What people recall under hypnosis could be influenced by things suggested to them.

The author concludes that a newborn’s health largely depends on the amount of food available to the mother during pregnancy. He supports this by pointing out that records from 1850 to 1900 show that birth weights in a certain region were higher in years following successful crop harvests.

The author presents two sets of phenomena: birth weights and crop success, and newborns' health and food availability during pregnancy. He shows a correlation between the first two—higher birth weights in a certain region in years after successful crop harvests—and uses this to draw a conclusion about the second two, arguing that a newborn's health largely depends on the amount of food available to the mother during pregnancy.