#1 - After a major toll highway introduced a system of

[Administrator]

Please post below with any questions!

[ChicaRosa]

I was stuck between answer choices B and C and ended up choosing the correct answer. I want to make sure I understand why C is correct and why B is wrong?

Is B wrong because even though sometimes there are long delays (meaning that it's not that often) on the highway it would still contribute to the air pollution on the highway decreasing measurably?

Is C correct because if people want to use a faster service to get on the highway the chances of those cars polluting the air on the highway increases?

Thanks!

[Adam Tyson]

Hey there Chica, thanks for asking.

The stimulus tells us that the new tolls have been great in many ways - delays are down, trips are faster, and pollution per trip decreased. Wonderful! But there's a problem, and that's that total pollution from cars did NOT go down. How can this be, especially since they just told us that pollution per trip went down? The answer is simple - more trips! We need an answer that increases the total number of trips, so that the pollution PER TRIP can go down at the same time that TOTAL pollution remains unchanged.

Answer C gives us exactly that. The motivation (faster, more convenient travel) is actually irrelevant here, so don't get hung up on WHY there were more trips, and focus instead on the fact that this answer is telling us that there are, in fact, more trips happening.

Answer B fails to resolve this paradox because it fails to address the fact that total pollution per trip is down. Okay, so some trips still involve delays, but despite that we know that pollution per trip is, on average, down. So why isn't overall pollution down? This answer tells us nothing about that, so it doesn't help. We don't want to deny the truth of the premises, so we need to accept that pollution per trip is indeed down.

By the way, I noticed an assumption in your analysis that you need to be very careful about. "Sometimes" does NOT mean "not very often". Sometimes means at least once, but it could mean all the time. Sometimes the sun rises in the east, doesn't it? Logically speaking, "some" (and variations like sometimes and somewhere) includes the concept of "all". Don't ever assume that sometimes means anything other than at least once, that it indicates a minority or a small amount, because it doesn't, not on the LSAT.

Thanks again for the question, and good luck in your continued studies. I hope this helped!