Summarize Argument
The editor concludes that the city’s claim about its new recycling program are absurd. This is because the same overall volume of recyclables will be collected, just over a greater number of collections.
Notable Assumptions
For the city’s claim to be absurd, the editor must assume that there could be no other benefits to the new collection schedule besides increasing the overall volume of recyclables collected. Since that volume will stay the same, the editor can’t see how the collection cycle could possibly be beneficial.
A
The cost of collecting and disposing of general trash has been less than the cost of collecting and disposing of recyclables, and this is still likely to be the case under the new recycling program.
We don’t care about general trash. We need to know whether the new recycling program will live up to the city’s claim.
B
Even if the volume of collected recyclables increases, that increase might not be enough to make the recycling program cost effective.
The city never claims the program will hit some arbitrary threshold of “cost effective.” It simply claims the program will be more cost effective.
C
Because the volume of recyclables people accumulate during a week is less than what they accumulate during two weeks, the city expects a recyclables pickup to take less time under the new program.
While a pickup will take less time, we have no idea how long two pickups every two weeks will take versus one pickup every two weeks. The author’s argument remains intact if those two pickups together take as long, or longer, than the single biweekly pickup.
D
A weekly schedule for recyclables pickup is substantially easier for people to follow and adhere to than is a schedule of pickups every other week.
While the overall volume will stay the same, people are more likely to put out their recyclables on a weekly schedule. Thus, the city will collect and sell more recyclables than before.
E
Because of the increase in the number of pickups under the new program, the amount charged by the contractor that collects the city’s recyclables will increase significantly.
This strengthens the author’s argument. The new recycling program won’t just be the same as before—it’ll be even more expensive.
Summarize Argument: Phenomenon-Hypothesis
The author concludes that the reasoning power and spatial intuition exercised in chess-playing likely can cause improvement in other intellectual activities. This is based on a study of a group of children who completed a program involving learning how to play chess. Most of the children who completed the program showed a large increase in schoolwork achievement.
Notable Assumptions
The author assumes that the students’ chess-playing causally contributed to their improved schoolwork achievement. The author also assumes a particular causal mechanism — that it was the reasoning power and spatial intuition exercised by chess that improved the children’s schoolwork achievement.
A
Some students who did not participate in the chess program had learned to play chess at home.
And did these students experience an improvement in schoolwork achievement? If we don’t know this, (A) has no impact.
B
Those children who began the program but who did not successfully complete it had lower preprogram levels of achievement than did those who eventually did successfully complete the program.
Pre-program levels of achievement are irrelevant, since the author never compared the absolute achievement levels of the students who completed the program to those of the students who didn’t. We still know the program-completers increased their achievement after the program.
C
Many of the children who completed the program subsequently sought membership on a school chess team that required a high grade average for membership.
This suggests a potential alternate hypothesis for the increase in achievement levels observed in the study. If many of the children wanted to join a team that required a high grade average, that could have motivated these students to do better on their schoolwork.
D
Some students who did not participate in the chess program participated instead in after-school study sessions that helped them reach much higher levels of achievement in the year after they attended the sessions.
The author never assumed that chess is the only activity that can improve student achievement. And, since we have no reason to think that the students who completed the chess program attended the sessions described in (D), this answer has no impact.
E
At least some of the students who did not successfully complete the program were nevertheless more talented chess players than some of the students who did complete the program.
We don’t know whether the students described in (E) experienced an increase in achievement levels. In addition, varyling levels of chess talent don’t necessarily impact the level of reasoning power or spatial intuition exercised during chess.