#13 - If the natural history museum stays within this year’s budget, it will

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Justify the Conclusion. The correct answer choice is (D).

Answer choice (A):

Answer choice (B):

Answer choice (C):

Answer choice (D): This is the correct answer choice.

Answer choice (E):

This explanation is still in progress. Please post any questions below!

[zoezoe6021]

I don't understand why D is correct.

D= renovate this year→/ stay with this year B

Stimulus:
stay with this year B→/ stay within next year B
/renovate this year→renovate next year→/ stay within next year B

If D is correct, then it seems like
A→B
A→C
========
B→C

[Jeff Wren]

Hi Zoe,

The first step to solving this Justify question is correctly identifying the conclusion and the premises of the argument. The conclusion is the first half of the first sentence.

You diagrammed this as:

stay with this year B→/ stay within next year B

One way to identify that this is the conclusion is the word "for" after the comma is a premise indicator, so the clause before the comma is the conclusion.

The other two conditional premises are:

P: /renovate this year→renovate next year
P: renovate next year→/ stay within next year B

You correctly realized that these premises can be linked into a conditional chain.

Our conclusion again is:

C: stay with this year B→/ stay within next year B

Now what we want in our answer is a conditional statement that gets us from the sufficient condition of our conclusion (stay with this year B) all the way to our necessary condition (/ stay within next year B) most likely by linking to our conditional chain in our premises.

A good prephrase for our correct answer would be:

stay with this year B →/renovate this year

Then we'd be able to link everything together:

stay with this year B →/renovate this year →renovate next year→/ stay within next year B

which would allow us to 100% prove our conclusion.

Now the tricky part is that any conditional answer can always be in the form of the contrapositive, which is what Answer D gives us.

renovate this year →/ stay with this year B (i.e. exceeding this year's budget)

is the contrapositive of what we were looking for to link everything together.

If you want to think of this argument using letters, the premises would be:

P: B → C
P: C → D

And our conclusion would be:

C: A → D

So what we need in our correct answer to link everything together is:

A → B