- Tue Aug 22, 2017 1:20 pm
#38656
Hi Pasu,
Thanks for the question! Let's look at the stimulus and each of the three answers you ask about:
Note how the stimulus is focused on countries and the costs involved in a country unilaterally imposing emissions standards. The line before the conclusion is key to understanding answer choice (B): "No nation will be willing to bear singlehandedly the costs of an action that will benefit everyone. It is obvious, then, that the catastrophic consequences of excessive atmospheric carbon dioxide are unavoidable unless_____." [italics added]. Thus, the author is driving at a solution that doesn't involve just a single nation, but more likely collective action between nations.
Answer choice (B): The stimulus is focused on countries and nations, and far less on corporations. So, although the test makers cleverly throw in "multinational" here, this answer is still about corporations, not nations.
Answer choice (C): "International" agreements is a reference to agreements between countries, meaning that this answer is in line with the focus on countries in the stimulus.
Answer choice (E): This answer goes too far. Nothing in the stimulus suggests we need a world government, but instead that something involving collective action is more necessary. The test makers would say that this goes beyond the bounds of the "logically completes" task in the question stem.
Answers (B) and (E) are the kind of answers that would, in certain cases, justify the conclusion, but we are looking for something that is closer to the line of reasoning used in the stimulus, and so answers that go in a different direction (B) or well past the author's reasoning (E) will be incorrect.
Please let me know if that helps. Thanks!
