Self-study
P: Conclusion Complying with the new safety regulations is useless. ████ ██ ███ ███ ███████████ ███ ████ ██ ██████ ██████ ████ ██████ ██████████ █████ ████ █████ ███ ████ █████████ ███ ████ ██ ███ ████████ █████████ ████ ██ ███████ ████ ██ ███ ███████ ███ ██████████ ███████
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Speaker 1 Summary
P says that it’s useless to follow the new safety regulations at the lab. Why? Because the regulations don’t address the causes of a fire that happened last year, and so the regulations wouldn’t have stopped the fire or prevented any injuries.
Speaker 2 Summary
Although not stated, Q’s argument leads to the implicit conclusion that following the new regulations is useful. Q says that any regulations that save money are useful, and the new regulations would prevent some accidents, thus saving money. This implies that, therefore, the new regulations are useful.
Objective
We need to find a point of disagreement. The usefulness of the new regulations is one such point: P thinks they’re useless, but Q thinks they’re useful.
11.
A point at issue between █ ███ █ ██ ███████
a
last year's fire ████████ ██ ██████ ██████ ██ ███ ██████████
Neither of the speakers actually says how costly the damage from last year’s fire was. Q says that every accident wastes money, but doesn’t say how much; P never discusses money at all.
b
accidents at the ██████████ ██████████ ██████ ██ ████████ ████████
Q disagrees with this, discussing the possibility of accidents where no one is injured. P, on the other hand, never states an opinion about any accident other than last year’s fire. We simply don’t know P’s perspective on this.
c
the new safety ███████████ ███████ ███ ██████████ █████ ██ ████ ██████ ████
P explicitly disagrees with this, but we don’t know what Q thinks. Q never weighs in on how the new regulations relate to last year’s fire, which means we can’t say that P and Q disagree.
d
it is useful ██ ██████ ████ ███ ███ ██████ ███████████
P explicitly disagrees with this, but Q implicitly agrees, making this the point of disagreement. Although Q never states that they new regulations are useful, Q’s argument logically leads to that conclusion, so we can infer that Q agrees with this claim.
e
the new safety ███████████ ███ ██████ ██ ██ ██████ ██ ███ ██████████
Neither speaker offers an opinion about how likely people are to obey the new regulations. The conversation is about the regulations’ usefulness, not lab members’ adherence to the regulations.