#12 - Policy: The factory’s safety inspector should not

[Administrator]

Question #12: Justify, SN. The correct answer choice is (B)

The Policy in this stimulus tells us the safety inspector shouldn’t approve a new manufacturing process without satisfying at least one of two conditions: safe usage at another factory for more than a year, or a demonstrable increase in safety once in place.

This is conditional, of course, and looks like this (with loose abbreviations for the three terms):

Approve Safely used elsewhere OR Increase safety

And the contrapositive:

Not Safely used elsewhere AND Not Increase safety Not Approve

The Application that follows addresses two of those three elements, telling us that the inspector should not approve a new welding process since it cannot be shown to increase factory safety.

This too is conditional:

Not Increase Safety Not Approve

Be careful with that last statement! It’s easy to get it reversed, but if you consider closely what’s being presented you should be okay: the fact that it cannot be shown to increase safety is what leads to the conclusion that it should not be approved, making “Not Increase Safety” the sufficient condition and “Not Approve” the necessary.
So when we observe the transition from Policy to Application, it’s clear that we’re missing a piece, “Not Safely used elsewhere.” That is, the Policy’s three-piece contrapositive is nearly matched in the Application, but not quite.

To prove the Application’s conclusion, “Not Approve,” we need to add the other condition, “Not safely used elsewhere,” and that’s what we should expect the correct answer choice to tell us about the proposed new welding process.

Answer choice (A): This answer does not provide the other sufficient condition—Not safely used elsewhere—that would lead to the Not Approve conclusion, so it does not prove the Application to be true.

Answer choice (B): This is the correct answer choice. By telling us that the proposed new welding process has not been used elsewhere, we now know both of the contrapositive’s (from Policy) sufficient conditions—Not safely used elsewhere (given by answer choice B) and Not Increase safety (given in the Application). With both of those in place, we arrive at the Application’s conclusion, “Not Approve.”

This is a pretty common form in Justify questions, where you need two things to prove a conclusion (two sufficients to yield a necessary in this case) and you only have one in the stimulus. The solution is for the correct answer to provide the other piece and thereby produce the desired conclusion.

Answer choice (C): also fails to give us the other, missing sufficient condition, so it does not prove the conclusion about non-approval to be valid. In fact, other manufacturing process at the factory are completely irrelevant to this argument.

Answer choice (D): This is the closest of the wrong answer choices, but it still does not tell us that this particular process—welding—has not been used elsewhere. This answer merely reaffirms a connection between approval and outside use, but even that is done in a way that doesn’t match the stimulus: the answer says “used extensively elsewhere,” an idea that is never mentioned in the argument above.

Answer choice (E): is almost an opposite answer! The fact that is has been used elsewhere goes largely against what we need, even if that “elsewhere” is only a single place. Of course, two unknowns still remain: how long was it used (the stimulus says a year or more), and was its usage safe (the stimulus it must be)? That is, if used for less than a year this could work. Similarly, if its use proved unsafe it could work. But without knowing either of those we can’t apply this answer to the argument at all.

[Kelly R]

Hi PS,

I just want to be sure that my reasoning for eliminating D is sound. This answer states that the safety inspector will not approve any new process that has not been used "extensively" elsewhere. But the policy states that a new process won’t be approved unless it has either 1). been used safely in another factory or 2). will demonstrably increase safety at the factory. So even if a process has not been used “extensively” elsewhere, it might still increase the safety at the factory, allowing for inspector approval. For this reason, I eliminated D

[Luke Haqq]

Hi Kelly R,

Yes, it appears that your reasoning is sound!

First, the policy can be diagrammed as follows:

Approve Safely used elsewhere for 1+ yrs. OR Increase safety

If a process is approved, then it has been used safely for more than a year at another factory or it will demonstrably increase safety at the factory. The contrapositive of this is:

Safely used elsewhere AND Increase safety Approve

Second, we're given the following application of the policy:

Increase safety Approve

That is, the application is a recommendation that the new welding process should not be approved, and the reasoning for this is that it cannot be shown to increase safety. If we look at the contrapositive that we have above, however, we know that a failure to show increased safety alone doesn't guarantee that a process should not be approved--rather, this would only follow if it did not demonstrate increased safety at the factory and additionally had not safely been used elsewhere for more than a year. Having both of these elements would allow the conclusion to follow, which is why this is classified as a Justify the Conclusion question.

Answer choice (D) ("The safety inspector will not approve any new process that has not been used extensively elsewhere") does not fill this gap between the premises and conclusion. If this were true about the safety inspector, it does not speak directly to the application, since we don't know whether or not the new welding process has been used extensively elsewhere. Since we don't know this, answer (D) isn't enough to justify the given application of the policy.